Viral
by Punctuator
Summary: Is it a crime or a disease? In a future Los Angeles where immortality is possible, something is cutting time horribly short for an increasing number of victims. Timekeeper Raymond Leon is on the case. Rated for gore and sensuality. Welcome to the Zone!
1. Chapter 1

**A/N:** [Another] one for the Cillian Murphy fans. Could be sketchy (for which I apologize), but I'm pretty sure there'll be at at least a bit of intrigue, gore, and future-noir in the coming chapters. As always, thank you for reading, and welcome aboard!

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**VIRAL**

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**Being: A Prologue**

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The need for permanent, or at least semi-permanent, personal connection seemed to have faded with the advent of immortality: what, after all, did love represent if not a sense of being united with someone against the void of eternity, the inevitability of death? Now that said inevitability had been removed from the human equation, or was being pushed continually toward a retreating temporal horizon, love for love's sake had largely ceased to be. People rich enough— those who had all the time in the world— were in no rush to find _the one_; the poor hadn't the time for love.

Love. Not to be confused with simple carnal needs. For Timekeepers, set as they were socially inter-strata, a working class not wealthy but certainly not temporally destitute, love was typically a frivolity to be disregarded. Sex, on the other hand, was a need as basic as food or sleep.

Caroline Rawlins, Timekeeper. Average female height, lean with a Timekeeper's muscle, straight dark hair kept short. Eyes taiga-grass-green, facial features more symmetrical than beautiful. Wearing today, on her downtime, a blue scoop-neck t-shirt and olive khaki trousers. Leon saw her, her name, and her weapons status (_None,_ per the metals scan) on the feed from his flat's security cam. He opened the door.

"Is it Friday, Timekeeper Rawlins?" he asked.

He wasn't joking; nor had he quite genuinely forgotten. Like many citizens his age, he'd become accustomed to thinking of time in terms of personal allocation, blocks of life, not as an arbitrary grid of months and weeks and days and their obsolete, mythic names.

Still, Rawlins smiled slightly, not quite showing her teeth, when she replied: "It's Friday, Leon."

Friday. One or two a month. His flat or hers. Conducive to longterm well-being: scheduled, agreed-upon physical contact— he found the word "date" shallow, if not repellent, the term "rendezvous" pretentious— with someone each of them could trust. They'd made the arrangement years ago. Leon ushered her inside, shut and locked the door behind her.

"Can I offer you a drink, Rawlins?" he asked.

Typically, she declined. But the day was abnormally warm for January. "Please," she replied.

In the kitchen, Leon poured two tall glass of sun-brewed tea-over-ice, something he enjoyed more almost as a memory of a former life, so long ago had he acquired his taste for it. He drank his unsweetened; she stirred into her glass, amid a soft clinking of ice cubes, a single teaspoon of sugar. They stood opposite each other in the kitchen, watching one another drink, companionably silent. Rawlins finished first. She set her glass on the sideboard next to the sink.

"Thank you, Leon," she said.

She left the kitchen, strolled away down the hallway leading to the flat's one bedroom. She reached back to unhook the chain holding her ident tags as she went. Leon finished his tea and followed, unbuttoning his shirt.

In the bedroom, Rawlins pulled her t-shirt over her head. She folded the shirt over the straight back of the room's one chair; then, as Leon finished his last button, she caught him by the right wrist, turned him to face her, and kissed him open-mouthed. She still wore her bra, powder gray, laceless; her covered breasts brushed his exposed chest. She released his wrist, ran her palm down his flat hard stomach, caressed him. A variation in procedure: normally, he initiated contact. He found this highly pleasurable; his body responded quickly to her touch. In turn, in tender exchange, he broke free of the kiss to lick and nibble her throat, especially the sensitive spot beneath her right ear.

Rawlins shifted against him. "I'm ready when you are, Raymond," she murmured.

Also effective: her tone. Slightly hoarse, definitely receptive. Over the years, they'd honed their technique, the tactics of their arousal. Leon finished her undressing; she finished his. A gesture inherently sensual. Caring as well, and, in caring, pleasantly, effectively erotic.

Nude, Rawlins stretched out on the bed. Leon didn't follow. He let his eyes take her in, the lean lengths of her, the curves, the toned strength; he bent to nuzzle her neck, to indulge for a moment in her scent. He let his fingers trace her back, just to the left of her spine.

He felt her tremble. "Come here," she said.

Two words. So simple a command. It was Leon's pleasure to obey. Rawlins took his hand and drew him down; thus summoned, he shivered slightly in turn.

It was simple, clean, efficient, and intense. They'd long since established their schedule of dominance, their control give-and-take. On this particular Friday, he took her; after a brief rest, the two of them panting, relaxed, side by side on his bed, she took him. Afterwards, they indulged in a doze. She lay in his arms.

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As usual, Leon offered her something to eat. Through contacts and a bit of overtime, he'd obtained a decent-sized piece of steak. Ribeye. Real beef. In his boxer-briefs, in the kitchen, he cooked it for them. That, and green string beans he'd purchased from a zone's-edge farmer's market.

As Leon dished their food and set the plates and two glasses of filtered water on the worn Formica of the table top, Rawlins, belted into his old black terry bath robe, ran an evaluating hand across his trapezius muscles. "You're tense," she said. A simple, accurate observation.

"New case," Leon replied. He sat down, reached for three-inch-high metal silo that contained pepper blend. He could play the role of cynical loner and go silent, could wait for her prompts. All of which would be inefficient, a waste of time. "I'm waiting to hear from a contact. What might amount to a new type of fraud," he added, before she needed to ask. "Someone dealing in invalid time."

Rawlins seated herself opposite him. "I haven't seen a flash on that."

"It's not in the system yet."

Rawlins nodded, cut herself a piece of steak. "Invalid time. That could be a threat on any number of levels."

"The most immediate question, without further information," said Leon, as he reached for his water glass, "is how someone who deals in such a thing could stay in business."

"Inherently alienating the client base."

"Alienating— or killing." He sipped his water, watched her eat. "Do you want to sleep here tonight, Caroline?"

"No. I have an early flight to catch. An exchange program with Zone Eight." She looked at him evenly, as if evaluating his expression. Her own was friendly and frank. As always, she met his eyes. "But I certainly wouldn't decline an offer of dessert before I go."

Leon smiled.

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Of all the positions available to them, missionary always proved to be the most satisfying, for reasons Leon (who lay for a moment, in languid exhaustion, in Rawlins' arms after they finished) would just as soon not acknowledge. Rawlins left his bed reluctantly. She showered, got dressed. He saw her to the door.

For a moment, Rawlins hesitated before stepping into the hall. Leon thought he saw her shiver. She looked at him and said: "Take care, Timekeeper Leon."

"As always, Timekeeper Rawlins." He added, then, speaking almost without intending to: "You take care as well. Safe flight to Zone Eight."

"Thank you."

She left. Leon closed and locked the door, went back to the bedroom. He checked his phone for messages from his contact: nothing.

Eight-point-seven-five hours until the start of his shift. He set his phone to ring, placed it on the nightstand next to the alarm clock. He stretched out on his back on the bed, switched out the light.

_Safe flight, Caroline_.

He slept.

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	2. Chapter 2

**A/N:** Another bit, practically right on top of the prologue. (But if I've got 'em, I should post 'em, right?) And so the mystery begins...

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The prime cause of death in the former United States: suicide.

The prime triggering factor for suicide? In a word: tedium.

The geneticists who had figured out how to shut down the aging gene hadn't thought things through. They were, after all, only scientists. Amoral in the truest, most decent, best intended of ways, they had conducted their bloodhound pursuit of immortality. And when they found immortality, the politicians took it away from them and proceeded to twist it to their ends.

Not that they, in turn, could be blamed, either. They were, after all, only politicians. Greed, the will to power, and shortsightedness defined them. Ironic, though, that the promise of eternal life, gift or curse that it was, should become the tool, the weapon, the attack-dog of those who were too busy strip-mining today to look, even, to tomorrow.

So, in the beginning, no one of influence gave generalized immortality much thought. Thought about it in the long term, anyway. Those who should have had a say— the psychologists, the philosophers— found themselves shouting into the wind. The odd yet touchingly strident article here and there about the risks to the mind and, more quaintly yet, the soul, all mowed down or ignored by those hypnotized by a dream become reality, the best of all possible news: death was dead, or at least wounded, crippled.

Or now, for the first time ever, humankind stood facing death eye to eye, as an equal.

Understandable, therefore, that the greedy, the naive, and the population at large should become intoxicated by the idea: _I can live forever_.

Which was not to say that immortality guaranteed perfection. Immortality didn't eradicate disease, physical defects, or mental illness. By the time people realized how long they would be trapped in their own bodies, even the supposed-best bodies in which they found themselves time-locked at the age of twenty-five, it was too late. And so they found themselves having to cope, for ever and always.

Or not.

Self-termination rates were highest, ironically, in the zone areas once considered most desirable for habitation. In the former United States, these areas included the southern and west coasts, the southwest. People needed definite seasons; they needed climatic change, even the set cycles of said change. The days of hot glare in, for example, the areas once known as Arizona, Florida, and California messed with people's heads. Like those dwelling above the Arctic Circle in months of semi-light, they began to lose their sense of time. _Was it yesterday— or centuries— before?_: Leon recalled the line from a poem he'd read, in public school, over seventy years ago. But it was apt. The sense of time passing went first— a variation, in a way, on the idea that travelers sense motion only through anomalies: if there were no bumps in the road, in other words, we would never know we were moving— followed by sense of purpose. _If I have no reason to be, why am I still here?_ Depression set in, and then, finally, mired in a perpetual present, trapped in a forever-now, the would-be suicide found Death patiently waiting.

As Death had been waiting all along.

Somewhat ironically, change stood as a counterpoint to stagnation when it came time for suicide to cull the herd. Those whom immortality burdened might pray for something different in their lives— something as prosaic as a different job, a different house, a move to a different zone; then, if and when change came, they couldn't cope with it. That, of course, was a malady reserved largely (or hardly at all, given the lot of its potential sufferers) to the lower classes. The rich, ironically, insulated themselves from change by indulging in it as much as possible: in having everything— all the vacation homes in every possible zone, all the cars, all the hobbies, all the toys, mechanical, human, and other— they effectively immobilized themselves. In having everything, they sank into a stagnation of their own making; in having everything, they had, in a way, nothing.

_The two prime triggers for suicide,_ thought Raymond Leon, from behind the wheel of his vintage Chrysler cruiser, a car matte-black and threateningly muscular, as the tires burred along the worn concrete and macadam of the old 105. _Things staying the same. Things changing. Which was it for you, Mr. Doe?_

Normally, suicides didn't require the services of Timekeepers. Real suicides, that is. The plain fact was that when the regular police found themselves with a body that hadn't been shot, stabbed, beaten to death, or time-jacked, they called Temporal Control. Forwarded a report of a "self-term, not otherwise specified." Which, Leon suspected, was what had happened forty-eight minutes ago, when he'd been paged, at four forty-six in the morning, from a sound and ostensibly dreamless sleep.

Odd, though, that Control had called him, specifically, off-duty as he had been. No doubt something to do with staffing shortages: a number of Timekeepers from Leon's precinct were presently on training sabbaticals in other zones. Fortunately, Jaeger, Leon's usual partner, was not among them. And, as he had been working the graveyard shift, Friday night into Saturday morning, when Leon flagged him as his ride-along, Jaeger was only too willing to escape his desk, the pile of reports he was completing, and the sterile harsh lighting of the ward room for a jaunt in the 'Cuda.

Someone had found the body in the the old switchyard for the Los Angeles Rapid Transit System, and that was where Leon and Jaeger were heading now.

"Friday," Jaeger mused, his symmetrically handsome African-North American face turned to look out at the darkness, the flash-by of streetlamps. Boredom made him both contemplative and bold. "Did they tear you away from Rawlins?"

Leon was unoffended. He knew Jaeger's habits as completely as Jaeger knew his: his Friday assignations with Timekeeper Rawlins, while not the subject of gossip or boasting on Leon's part, were hardly a secret to his duty partners. "She left just before twenty-three hundred hours."

With that, he went quiet. Focused on his driving, the reassuring rumble of the V-8. His lingering thoughts regarding the suicide they were apt to find at the switchyard. Jaeger read something else into his boss's silence. "You could ask her to marry you, you know," he said. "Hell, for that matter, she could ask you."

"And then what? We apply for a double-occupancy flat in a cleaner block, submit our reproduction request?"

"You're both shoe-ins to be classified as optimal breeding material: that'd be a given."

Normally, Leon would simply have been annoyed with Jaeger both for the suggestion and the implication; now, with the sensory memory of Rawlins barely hours old, the thought of her potentially agreeing to mate with him brought a tingle to his loins. A moment later, of course, he was annoyed with himself for said moment of fantasy, and with Jaeger for triggering it. But he was grateful for the irritation, too. It helped him to wake up, to focus on the situation at hand.

A black forensics van and two matte-gray cruisers, one marked as an L.A. patrol car, were parked thirty meters inside the razor-wire-topped chain-link fencing that marked the perimeter of the switchyard. The yard's outer gate was open; a duty cop in midnight blue eyed Leon's I.D. and waved them in with a flashlight. The van and cruisers were parked just outside the high overhang of the rusted corrugated steel roof of the warehouse-sized car yard. Leon drove in slowly, letting the 'Cuda pick its way through the debris and worn dusty ruts of the switchyard, and parked to the right of the second car. He shut off the motor; he and Jaeger got out.

"Barnes: Leon," he said to the collar transmitter linked to his belt radio. "Jaeger and I are on-site."

_We're in the coupling area, Leon,_ replied Forensics Specialist Carl Barnes. _Forty meters in, take a left._

"Copy that, Barnes."

Leon and Jaeger unclipped flashlights from their duty belts, switched them on, headed in to the car yard. It was a bit like stepping back in time: while the cars on the yard's periphery were of modern make, either recently swapped out or in need of repair, the cars parked further back were older, then older still, their fading paint in colors that Leon hadn't seen on the tracks for years, their side-plates bearing the names of stations and stops that no longer existed. Like a physical manifestation of the stillness of the place, the dust underfoot, powder-soft, grew deeper the farther in they went.

And there was something else. "What's that smell?" Jaeger asked.

"I'm not sure," Leon replied. "Faulty sewer connection. Dead rat, maybe."

It was intensifying as they picked their way among the derelict cars to the turning point Barnes had specified. An odor like rotting meat, sweet, sharp, sickening. A greasiness to it that stuck to the insides of the nostrils.

"Be a hell of a rat," Jaeger muttered.

They reached the coupling zone. A half-dozen spur-tracks that led out to the main lines, powerful yellow-bodied tow carts, heavy hydraulic hoists. And a rough ring of lights marking out something on the dusty, debris-strewn ground. Carl Barnes and Timekeeper Aron Garner came to meet them. Behind them, two field-techs in gray coveralls were carefully surveying the area surrounding the object at the center of the ring of lights, taking pictures, tweezering and bagging samples.

Garner was six-foot-four if he was an inch. He had granite-red hair, a pale face set perpetually in an eagle's scowl. "Leon," he said.

"Timekeeper Garner."

Carl Barnes offered Leon half a smile. A half was all he had. Fifteen years ago, he'd been involved in a horrible auto crash: a year's effort had left him able to walk but unable, fully, to straighten his mangled spine; nerve damage froze the right side of his face. He had straight mouse-brown hair that sometimes fell across his eyes, tired, thoughtful, and pale blue. "Timekeepers," he said, greeting both Leon and Jaeger.

Leon replied: "What do you have for us, Examiner Barnes?"

"I'm not exactly sure."

On-duty, Barnes was rarely facetious. Humor on the job was a waste of time in the best of scenarios.

"Explain," said Leon, as Barnes led them toward the thing at the center of the lights.

"Male. We think. We won't be certain without a detailed autopsy."

A chill could still pass through him, even after all these years. Leon frowned. "You _think_...?"

"You tell me, Raymond."

Barnes came to a halt at the edge of the ring of lights. Leon and Jaeger did, too. They looked where Barnes was looking. For a second, in Leon's peripherals, Jaeger turned his head away.

Leon felt his jaw muscles clench as he looked at _it_. It was a human body, obviously. Sprawled on the rough ground.

No: more accurately, it was _splattered_ on the ground. Within the weak confines of jeans, a possibly black t-shirt, a brown jacket. It was as if the body had exploded inside the clothes it wore. And the face: superating on the skull. Melting, literally. Puddles of black-red ichor where the eyes should be, cheeks and jowls sloughing down and away, making rust-colored mud of the dust. The smell, that rotting-sweet smell, was almost palpable.

"We think it was some kind of acid," Barnes said. "No residual spray in the area, as far as we can tell, so we think he— she— it was immersed in whatever it was and then brought here."

"Why was I called to the scene?" Leon asked.

Timekeeper Garner replied: "Because we found your number on its phone, Timekeeper Leon."

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	3. Chapter 3

**A/N:** Another bit. Again: post 'em while you got 'em, right? Have at it. The plot should be thickening any time now. And, of course, any questions or comments, exaltations, or random acts of excoriaton, feel free to let out a holler.

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The coupling area of the switchyard turned out to be in a blank zone. No working municipal camera feeds within three hundred meters of where a rail worker had first spotted the body, via the onboard camera of a robotic track-sweeper, from the yard's control bunker. (And, no, the sweeper hadn't recorded the victim or the killer entering the yard. Leon found that out right after he and Jaeger learned that the killing had, of course, occurred well out of sight of the state's many electronic eyes.)

"Well, we have that much, anyway," Leon said. "Whoever killed Mr. Doe knew enough to avoid CCTV."

As additional forensics workers arrived on the scene and began the grisly task of scraping up, scooping up, and bagging the body, the techs who'd been first on the scene informed Leon, Jaeger, and Garner that they'd found two sets of footprints in the immediate area: both were tread-sets common to light tactical boots, the first an estimated men's size ten belonging to a subject that weighed approximately one hundred and eighty pounds, the second belonging to a pair of size eights appended to the legs of someone weighing roughly one hundred and sixty pounds. The first subject had walked with a right-side limp.

Garner watched as four techs carried away the thick-skinned black bag containing the melted body. The ground was too uneven to allow for a gurney. "Did your informant have a limp, Leon?"

Countered Leon, looking coolly at his fellow Timekeeper: "Why were you first on the scene, Garner?"

"I was returning from a call outside of Navarro. Routine time-theft."

"Ah. _Routine_. Of course." Before Garner could properly bristle, Leon motioned to one of the first-response techs, who, hazmat mask removed, proved to be female, blue-eyed, short-cut blonde, surprisingly feminine. "Technician—"

"Lancaster, sir."

"Technician Lancaster, I'll need a survey of tire treads from the yard lot not belonging to our cruisers or forensics vehicles."

"Yes, sir."

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Examiner Barnes joined his team in the collection of evidence. Timekeeper Garner returned to his patrol, to his routine. Leon and Jaeger remained for a time at the scene. Almost certainly, labwork would tell them how next to proceed: what clues there would be would be the result of tests performed on the corpse, of finding matches for the shoe treads in the textiles database. Still, Leon often found it helpful to linger at the scene of a crime. Observation and quiet contemplation _in situ_ often produced insights beyond the capabilities of microchips and mainframes; the fastest CPUs were still no match for experience and imagination.

"The clothing wasn't burned," Jaeger said, looking where the corpse had lain. "If someone had immersed the body in acid, the clothing would have been damaged, too. Right?"

"It might depend on the type of acid, Timekeeper Jaeger." Leon watched as, across the way, near one of the battered yellow tow carts, Examiner Barnes paused in his work and, wincing, stretched his twisted spine.

Jaeger watched Barnes, too. "_Did_ your contact have a limp, Raymond?"

"No," said Leon. "No, he didn't."

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From the rim of the Valley, early morning sunlight pushed like a paint scraper through the purple-yellow scrim of smog hovering above the Los Angeles sprawl. Leon and Jaeger returned to Control. Seven-fourteen a.m. As Leon swung the cruiser into its reserved spot in the underground parking garage, he was thinking of the scene in the switchyard, the position and condition of the body: Was it a message? If so, for whom? For a rival gang or drug dealer, for Leon himself? The first two the police and the Timekeepers could moot right out of the gate: no need for the press to become involved, no need for the story to leak out to the public at large. These days, the news media, finally cowed through decades of buy-outs, force, and threats both covert and overt, knew their place as the mouthpiece of government and big business. Breaking a story that might embarrass a single Timekeeper with a potentially murdered contact was hardly worth the storm of grief said story would call down upon the publisher.

Which left Leon himself. Or, less egotistically, the Timekeepers in general.

As he and Jaeger rode the creaking lift up to the main hall, Leon felt a twinge of impatience. Hours it would be before the lab would have test results for him; like the 'keepers themselves, the science divisions of the organization were at present understaffed. The public was becoming more inclined either to ambition or to settling; between those who wanted to soar toward power and wealth and the many more who fell victim to the narcolepsy of social apathy, the middle ground was slowly eroding. Fewer and fewer citizens perceived much reward in the long years of study and middling pay of such professions as forensic science; fewer still had the qualifications, both mental and physical, that could make them Timekeepers. They were, Leon thought, honestly, bleakly, a dying breed.

Paradoxically, that thought brought Rawlins to mind. Right about now, she and the other Timekeepers bound for Zone Eight would be boarding the jump-plane at Van Nuys.

"Well, this is where we part company," said Jaeger.

They were at the juncture in the main hall that led either back to the ward room and Interrogation, or to the locker room, the inventory area, and general stores. Leon had caught Jaeger right at the end of his shift, and Jaeger was due to receive his day's standard re-charge and to go home for a few hours' sleep.

"Right." Leon offered his partner one of his rare smiles. "Thanks for riding along, Terrence."

"No problem, Raymond. Catch you later."

Jaeger walked off toward the locker room. Leon continued in to the ward room. He had a summons waiting when he reached his desk; a light flashed blue on his answering machine. The Captain wanted to see him.

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The nouveau-immortal showed their nearly imperceptible true age in different ways. In its chiseled high cheekbones and nearly too-full lips, in the pale blue intent of its wideset eyes, Raymond Leon's might have been the face of a vengeful marble angel; his was a handsome unearthliness that time seemed unable or afraid to touch. Captain Martin Wagner, by comparison, one hundred and forty-nine years old, possessed a face rare in this age of agelessness: in it, its angles as bleak and sharp as the sea-cliffs of his half-ancestral Norway, one could picture the face he might have had had he aged in a time before the lockdown of the T-gene. He was, as they all were, forever twenty-five; with but a bit of imagining, one could see in his eternal, ageless crags an imposing, gray-tinged fifty-five or sixty. As things stood, his hair was black, combed back neatly off a high forehead. His eyes were gray-blue, his usual expression intent and thoughtful.

He looked up from his desk monitor when Leon rapped on the metal door frame. The door, as usual, was open. Wagner kept few barriers between himself and his people. "Leon."

"You wanted to see me, sir?"

"Come in."

Wagner gestured to a chair opposite his at his desk. Leon came in, sat down.

"The body found at the switchyard," said Wagner. "There's a good chance it was one of your contacts, Raymond: correct?"

"Yes, sir."

"We'll need the video feeds from your flat for the last five days."

Another of Wagner's rare and special traits: his fairness to his personnel. Technically, there was no need for him to inform Leon that the feeds from his flat would come under scrutiny. Any aspect of a Timekeeper's life could at any time be co-opted during the course of an investigation.

"Of course." Leon nodded. "Thank you for informing me, sir."

Still: a moment passed. "You're hesitating, Timekeeper Leon," Captain Wagner said, without accusation.

"Last night, I was... entertaining a third party, sir."

"Legally, of course, I assume."

"It was a fellow Timekeeper, sir."

"Rawlins?"

Leon had to wonder, for just a moment, if there was anyone in the force— in the entire Los Angeles basin, for that matter— who didn't know about his intimate appointments with Timekeeper Rawlins. "Yes, sir."

"We will be discreet."

"Thank you, sir."

Wagner met his eyes, nodded. "That will be all, Timekeeper."

Leon stood. "Sir."

He left Wagner's office.

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When he was nearly back to the ward room, he heard the first of the alerts, a slow-crawl siren whooping from the box-speakers mounted high on the walls. Between wails, the flat female voice that announced disasters great and small was intoning:

_— to emergency channel two. Please tune to emergency channel two for further details. Repeat: this is a fatal reduction-in-force announcement. Please tune to emergency channel two for—_

Leon's desk was on the far side of the ward room. He caught the Timekeeper nearest him as he entered the room. All around them, Timekeepers were consulting ear-feeds, checking desk monitors, shifting in groups toward the wide data-screens bracket-hung from the ceiling.

"What's going on?" Leon asked the man.

"Jump-ship leaving Van Nuys," the Timekeeper replied. He was Leon's height, fair-haired, gray-eyed. Young through the face. Likely well under a hundred years old: his expression betrayed untempered shock. "Timekeepers bound for Zone Eight-"

"What happened, Timekeeper?"

"They crashed, sir. About ten minutes after takeoff. They _crashed_."

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	4. Chapter 4

**A/N:** If anyone's out there: hail and well met! I know we're a bit off the beaten track with this one, both content- and category-wise. Thanks for reading! And, as always, don't be afraid to give a shout-out. Comments are always appreciated!

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Budget cuts. The flight from Van Nuys, carrying twelve Timekeepers bound for exchange-training in Zone Eight, had but one pilot. But that wasn't where the problem lay: had Temporal Control budgeted fully for software updates in the transportation division, the jump-ship's co-pilot program would have been up-to-date and functioning. But TD had channeled most of its limited funds into maintenance, armor, and armament for its ground vehicles. As a result, the pilot on the flight out of Van Nuys was alone in the cockpit.

Which wouldn't have been a problem if, eight minutes and twenty-eight seconds after takeoff, his flesh hadn't started to melt.

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Seven minutes after takeoff, Timekeeper Arlen Holmes nudged Timekeeper Caroline Rawlins and asked, a wry smile on his broad face: "Want the window seat, Caroline?"

Rawlins loosened her grip on the armrests. "Can I vomit out of that window, Len? If not: no."

Holmes chuckled, relaxing his big frame into his seat. Rawlins tried to smile, too, to share in his humor if not his sense of ease. She hated jump-ship take-offs, that was all. The steep vertical angle, the acceleration that seemed to leave her stomach thousands of feet below. In less than a minute, she told herself, they'd be leveling out. Forty-five seconds from now, she, like Holmes and the others, would be treating the flight like the micro-vacation it was. She'd settle herself against the hard cushions of her seat, slip into the sleep she'd missed last night (a sweet missing, though, she had to admit, when said missing involved Raymond Leon). Mere seconds from now.

On cue, as she'd mentally timed it, the jump-plane began to level out.

And just as Rawlins closed her eyes and allowed herself to share Holmes' smile, an awful scream, its intensity unblunted by the roar of the engines, erupted from the cockpit.

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Nine minutes and forty-seven seconds after takeoff, the jump-ship out of Van Nuys plummeted like a meteorite into a ridging of dunes and hills in the desert to the east of Los Angeles.

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She shouldn't have been alive. She should have died.

She survived because she was forward, not aft, when the crash occurred. The jump-planes available to Temporal Control were refitted military craft. Reinforced in certain areas against such extreme stressors as heavy strafing. One such area was the cockpit.

All of which she would think through later. Presently, she couldn't move. Something heavy was pinning her torso. Nor could she see: either she was in total darkness or she'd been blinded in the crash. She was disoriented, and she was in pain, from her legs, ribs, and right arm. A cacophony of discomforts ranging in intensity from _whisper_ to just short of _scream_.

Something thick and warm was dripping onto her face.

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Raymond Leon was not a trained rescue worker. He was not a wreck reconstructionist. He'd been, for more than most of his life, a city-dweller; his ideas regarding survival in a desert environment, while pragmatic, were at best rudimentary. In short, his presence was not required at the crash site east of L.A.

So, while he awaited updates or department-issued requests for donations of blood or time for survivors who were very likely nothing but meat-paste at the bottom of a fresh crater (and, just for a moment, he felt resentment on top of his standard shock at the news of the crash: why did it have to be _her_? Not, of course, that he could blame Rawlins for being on a doomed flight, not that he could fault his feelings for her— and there stood a simple fact: you had feelings for someone with whom you engaged in sexual intercourse, ate, and slept on a regular basis, even if you rarely spent more than six hours at a time in each other's company and typically called each other by your respective surnames— but concern and worry blunted efficiency, and they certainly had no place on the street), Leon did his job. Alone, without Jaeger, who'd gone home for a few hours' re-charge in anticipation of a hellish day to come, he revisited the switchyard, to see the crime scene in the light of another smog-bleared L.A. day. By that gritty light, he saw nothing he hadn't seen earlier. It was overcast, the clouds like rolls of dross off a metal casting; as he walked back to his cruiser, across the oily packed dirt of the switchyard front lot, it started to rain, big, tepid, chemical-laden drops that tamped the dust and the day's rising heat while simultaneously boosting the lot's gritty petroleum stink— and washing away the tread marks Leon had asked Technician Lancaster to screen. Not that it mattered: she'd gotten back to him before he left the rail-car housing. Nothing on the tire marks. No customs, no exotic makes, no abnormal weights on any of the axles, no obvious tell-tale anomalies, mineral or vegetable. He'd thanked her for her efficiency, hung up, re-pocketed his phone.

When he was halfway back to Control, the L.E.D. on his cruiser's dash-mounted comms unit flashed. Leon kept his eyes on the street, on the churn of traffic, as he tapped the intercom button. "Leon."

_Barnes here, Raymond. I have something you should see. Come to the lab; I'll be waiting._

On line four, Leon noticed, glancing at the comms unit's digital display. For a moment, he thought it odd that Barnes was using a non-public channel, not the department's general-calls line one. But Barnes was Barnes, and like many of the men and women who shared his profession, he tended to be insular both in terms of data and of trust.

"I'll be there in ten, Barnes. Leon out."

What he didn't ask Barnes with regard to what the _something_ might be, he confirmed for himself when he returned to Control. Thirty seconds to stop at his desk and request of his computer the latest update from the crash site. Four names. Four of _twelve_. Four survivors (_condition and status prone to change_):

_Delano, Terrence_

_Gibson, Mariel_

_Marisol, Ramon_

_Rawlins, Caroline_

Leon straightened away from his desk, drawing and releasing, as he did, in counter-measure to a relief so unexpected and intense as to momentarily dizzying, a breath long, slow, and deep, and went to take the lift down to the science level.

#####

Some might have said that those who worked in the science division of Temporal Control were consigned to the depths, denizens of an intellectual but stifling upper level of Hell. Leon tended to find calmness, if not comfort, in the earthquake-proof labs five floors below street level. An order to the activity, in contrast to the swarming above, a cave-like dry coolness that seemed easily preferable to the laboring of the air-conditioning inside the Main Hall and the ward room, the ozone-depleted glare out on the streets. He walked the main hall off the elevator bank, the round overheads reflecting like headlamps in the liquid-black gleam of the flooring underfoot, back to Barnes' open office, just off the main bio-pathology lab.

He found Barnes hunched within a ring of computer monitors, looking intently at the centermost screen; Barnes, seeing Leon approach, smiled slightly and straightened up, a movement that, for him, amounted to a locked shrugging of his right shoulder. "Leon."

"What do have for me, Examiner Barnes?"

Barnes nodded toward the center screen. "Come here and have a look." He added, softly, as Leon joined him in the semi-circle of monitors: "You seem relieved, Raymond. You must have seen the survivors list."

His tone carried a hint of yearning, of sadness, not sarcasm. Barnes had lost his wife in the crash that crippled him; he could well understand the importance of the occasional miracle.

"I have," Leon replied, mildly. "What was it you wanted me to see, Carl?"

Barnes trailed and splayed the fingers of his left hand across the virtual touch-pad hovering above the keyboard of the center monitor, scattering windows, de-sizing some, up-sizing one in particular. He stopped at a freeze-frame of a man in flight-suit and black helmet, his face at roughly a two-thirds angle to the camera, controls in gloved hands, seated amid the toggles, lights, and gauges of what had to be the instrument banks of a jump-plane.

"What we have here, Timekeeper Leon, is a copy of the audio-visual component of the black-box recording from the cockpit of today's unfortunate flight," said Barnes. "Internal Affairs is, of course, poring over the original with the priceless assistance of the Event Reconstruction team."

Leon didn't fault the man his droll phrasing: Barnes was brilliant, and he'd been in chronic pain for years. His acidic attitude was, no doubt, one of his few honest pleasures.

"What am I looking for?"

"A most disturbing case of pilot distress."

"Be more specific, Carl."

"Brace yourself, Raymond. I hope you've not had anything of value for breakfast."

With that, Barnes flicked his right index finger at the virtual touch-pad; onscreen, the image unpaused.

The pilot was fine. For eight seconds, according to the time-stamp in the lower right-hand corner of the frame, he went about the business of guiding the plane through its final moments of ascent.

Then he screamed.

The sound froze Leon, locked his eyes on the screen. His every animal instinct told him simultaneously to look and to look away.

"And: here—" Barnes said, calmly. He made a cupping gesture toward the screen, in the region of the pilot's exposed lower face. "He begins to hemorrhage. Skin losing elasticity, becoming sponge-like. The pores breaking down—"

Translation: the pilot was literally melting before their eyes. Against the pull of his shoulder harness, he flailed and thrashed in his seat.

"The muscle goes next," Barnes intoned. "Followed shortly by the tendons. Watch the left hand."

With said hand, the pilot struck— at this point, he could not have been consciously reaching for anything— the left-side upright of the joystick. On impact, the skin-tight glove on said hand flew off. _Impossible_, Leon thought, half-subconsciously.

Until he realized that the glove still contained most of the pilot's left hand.

Alarms went off as the plane lost orientation. By then, a handful of Timekeepers were forcing their way into the cockpit. Rawlins was among them. The audio portion of the playback was harder to take, oddly enough, than the visual feed, which cut out, anyway, about seven seconds later. Leaving only—

_What's wrong with— the fuck, the fuck— what's happening to him—_

_Override—_ Rawlins' voice. Leon's stomach tightened. _Find the overrides— find the goddamn— Oh, God_—

Chaos. A screech of static, a screaming from the engines. Easy, and horrifying, enough to understand what was happening: by the time the Timekeepers in the cockpit found the auto-pilot, the jump-plane was in a flat spin. Grunts and shouts, a rough thumping, as the Timekeepers in the cockpit lost their balance, were slammed into each other, into the ceiling, into the windscreen.

A man's voice, eerily calm: _Sweet Jesus._

And: nothing.

Leon found himself shaking. When Barnes spoke again, he started.

"Similar to the body in the switchyard." Barnes' eyes on him were calm but sympathetic. "That's why I called you in, Leon."

Only this was worse than what they found in the switchyard. Of the four Timekeepers who broke into the cockpit, two died. Two survived. Rawlins and Delano. They spent the better part of two hours trapped in the wreckage while the rescue team located them and cut their way in. Nearly two hours pinned in the wreckage, in shock and pain, and covered by the pilot's exploded remains.

Until the pilot's cause of death was known, they were presently quarantined in the infirmary.

#####

#####

Time, thought Leon, to shake down his contact's contacts. Only that could take place in a few hours. Vermin tended to be most active at night. Leon left the science division intending to find himself something to eat, to shower and shave and perhaps re-charge for an hour or so. He'd need to be sharp.

Anton Hurst caught him at the elevator banks in the Main Hall.

#####

Hurst was the triage clinic's primary pharmacologist. Tall, reed-like and gangly, fair-haired, possessed of a face that seemed to be both scowling and smiling at the same time. Perpetual apology in his pale gray eyes. He stopped just short of touching Leon's arm.

"A moment, Timekeeper?"

Leon was feeling hungry, troubled, worn out; even at his best, he had little patience for temerity. "What is it, Doctor?"

"It's... Timekeeper Rawlins."

"Has her condition worsened?"

"No. Merely a request, on behalf of the chief supervisor of surgery—"

"Yes—?" Leon prompted.

Hurst hesitated, while a twitching worked its way around the muscles of his face. He seemed to be chewing out how best, tactfully, to proceed. Finally, he said: "Will you speak to her, Timekeeper? She's unconscious, but she needs to hear a familiar voice."

Rawlins' family lived in Zone One. The opposite coast. Even if they'd been informed of the accident, which was unlikely, they wouldn't be able to afford the flight to Los Angeles. The brother she'd had living in L.A. had died in a construction accident three years ago.

"Of course," Leon said.

#####

Because of the treatment afforded Timekeepers who entered State-run hospitals (said treatment ranging in description from "cavalier" to "mysteriously fatal"), Temporal Control had its own medical facilities, a clinic, surgery, and hospital block. Rawlins and the other survivors of the Van Nuys crash were in quarantine rooms a floor above the surgery, a long walk back from the Main Hall through a skyway of steel and dirty bulletproof glass, a bio-scan checkpoint at either end.

#####

The surgery's auto-docs worked quickly and efficiently. If a living body could be salvaged, it was, with a minimum of error. Still, repair was not a synonym for recovery. Seeing Rawlins was a shock. Pale, her face bruised, stitches closing cuts on her forehead, her left cheek. Her body too still in a blue hospital gown, her form too small on the bed. The nurse on duty in the quarantine area, a female Timekeeper-slant-RN by the name of Tolliver, with pale amber eyes and fawn-brown hair tied neatly back, who wore a medical-white uniform jacket in place of a Timekeeper's standard black, offered Leon a steel-frame vinyl-padded chair. He pulled it close to the thick glass of Rawlins' quarantine cell; near the cell's intercom, he seated himself on the chair's worn black cushions. He looked at Rawlins, lying, eyes closed, no more than two meters away, amid what was practically a cityscape of blinking monitors, and he wondered—

_What do I talk about?_

All the stereotyped things, the ridiculous things: weather, or the half-boiled, glaring perpetual poison that passed for weather in Los Angeles; news from within the department or without, or things she already knew or already was; or his investigation— and, now, _there_ was something positive to relay to one in a coma: _I don't have a single solid lead, Caroline. Literally, as the victims are melting. Oh, and by the way, just to cheer you up: whatever killed my contact is likely to have killed your pilot, too._

It didn't help, either, that the ward was under camera surveillance. Shiny black eyes in all the corners. Which, for a Timekeeper, was life as usual: said to live— _expected_ to live— above reproach, they gave up their personal privacy to the cameras Control installed and maintained in their flats. Those very cameras had watched Leon sleep, eat, laugh at the occasional guilty pleasure on vid; they'd watched as Leon and Rawlins had sex, for God's sake.

But this was different. This— his being here, trying to find things to say to her while she was helpless and unconscious— was being done without her consent. Still:

He thought, he considered; finally, he knew what to say. "Caroline, it's Timekeeper Leon. Raymond. You threatened, once, to teach me how to ski." He could hear his voice, with the whisper of ventilation, through the speaker on the other side of the glass, near Rawlins' bed. He spoke to her, to her still, stitched, bruised face, not to the intercom. "If the offer still stands, I would like very much to take you up on that threat..."

#####

But, still: he was almost relieved when Jaeger paged to call him away to another nightmare.

#####

#####

The fifth floor of an eight-story housing flat in the eastern quadrant of the ghetto. Corner flat. Three bodies, adult, two male, one female. Or so it seemed, according to the indefatigable Barnes, whose people, among them Technician Lancaster, obviously bucking for early advancement, were already on the scene. No reliable occupancy record for the flat, however. Of course. Timekeepers and regular police were already canvassing the building for suspects or witnesses.

While Barnes and his people inventoried the scene, Leon went with the officers working the corridor to the left of the flat; Jaeger went right. Two doorframes full of sullen, fearful denial in the form of three women, two men, and a handful of dirty urchins who saw nothing, heard nothing; one door kicked in to darkness and must, a scattering of roaches, the drip of water from a broken pipe.

Jaeger blipped in on Leon's collar receiver. _Raymond, I think we have a witness. Apartment five-eleven._

"Good." Leon broke away from the police officers, turned back toward the corner flat. He made no effort to keep the impatience from his voice. "We'll take him out to the edge of the zone, time him down—"

At a trot, he passed the forensics crew at the crime scene. A sound of arguing came from ahead. A woman's voice: "You have no right to be in here. Don't you _dare_ touch her—"

Jaeger was standing outside the open door of apartment 511. Leon, joining him, looked inside.

In a semi-circle of police officers, a dark-haired woman stood fiercely guarding a girl possibly seven or eight years old. The woman wore a stained gray t-shirt and weathered dungarees; the girl was in green pajamas. Both of them were spattered and smeared with blood.

"Our witness," said Jaeger, nodding toward the little girl.

#####

#####

Back at Control, someone better versed in procedure than in practicality called Social Services before Leon or any of the other investigating officers had a chance to speak to the girl; consequently, as was her legal right, she was not to undergo any form of interview ("interrogation" being a term those of "social" sensibilities were loath to use with regard to children) until she had proper guardianship in the form of a DSS worker. Who would have to be contacted and assigned and who would then have to make the commute to Control, all of which would take an hour or better. Leon decided to start the interrogations— the _interviews_— with the girl's protector, the fierce dark-haired woman from the flat down the hall.

#####

#####

She reminded him, uncomfortably, of Rawlins. A fallen-Rawlins. Or a projection of Rawlins he could somehow resent, as this version, the ghetto-dweller, was sitting, healthy and functioning, in an interrogation room while the real Rawlins, the duty-bound, honorable Rawlins, lay damaged in a hospital bed.

Her name was Laura Vedder. Leon noted, glancing further down her intake sheet: "You're a climatologist."

"Yes." Not _Yes, Timekeeper._ Not _Yes, sir._ From across the steel top of the room's table, she was watching Leon directly, not at all apprehensively, with hard, dark eyes.

"How necessary is climatology in a zone like this?"

"Not as necessary as I'd been led to believe, obviously."

"Obviously. Still, you're a scientist: what is a scientist doing, living in the ghetto?"

"I lost my housing rating when my husband died."

"Died—?"

"He timed out."

"Intentionally," Leon suggested, with possibly a bit more cruelty than was absolutely necessary.

Nonetheless, she didn't flinch. "Yes."

"That shouldn't have been enough to invalidate your housing rating."

"I have a record."

"Really."

"If you must pretend you don't know: on a field expedition ten years ago, I questioned the authority of the scientist in charge."

"Questioning got you arrested?"

"No. Breaking the bastard's nose did."

Leon suppressed a cold smile. "What does a climatologist with a temper do for a living, Miss Vedder?"

"I analyze meteorological data for an agricultural firm. And I work four to six shifts a week down in the factory zone."

"Two jobs. How do you manage it?"

A sardonic smile, utterly unhidden. "Clean living."

"As part of this investigation, Miss Vedder," Leon said, "Temporal Control requests that you provide certain biological samples—"

"Blood, you mean."

"Do you agree?"

"Do I have a choice?"

"Not particularly." Leon stood up, looked down at her. "Then again, you knew that."

"If I call you a bastard to your face, Timekeeper, will you arrest me?"

At the door of the interrogation room, Leon paused. "That, Miss Vedder, would be a waste of my time."

He walked out.

#####

#####

He left Laura Vedder in the capable hands of the tissue-collection team. By then, given his plans, now hours old, to head out after dark in search of secondary sources and contacts to shake down, it was too late to go home. What he told himself, anyway. He got a protein-paste sandwich wrap and a cup of coffee from the commissary, requested a time-boost from the dispensary. Then he drifted back, down the long, dirty-windowed skyway, to the surgery.

Much to his surprise, Rawlins was awake.

More than that, within the confines of her quarantine cell, she was up. Standing. Quietly examining the banks of blinking monitors beside her bed.

Almost cautiously, as if Rawlins were animated by a force if not supernatural then certainly not within the realm of regular medical possibility, Leon approached the thick glass. "Caroline."

She turned his way. Found him through the glass with, it seemed, some effort. "Raymond."

"How are you?"

"My left arm is broken." She kept her eyes shy of his as she spoke, as if she were speaking of something shameful. In her mind, thought Leon, she might well have been. Survivor's guilt. _What the hell is she doing up? Where is the nurse?_ "I have three broken ribs. Bruises, contusions—"

"Caroline—" He moved closer. Kept his eyes on her as he repeated: "— how are you?"

She considered. Her voice when she spoke next was quieter, less assured: "Shaken."

"Are you in pain?"

Rawlins nodded.

"Have they given you anything for it?"

"Neuroquel."

Neuroquel was a general analgesic just a click or two above aspirin. Leon frowned. "That's all?"

"I can't afford anything stronger."

"Is that what they told you?"

"They let me do the math," she said. "Doctor Hurst: do you know him?"

"I know him."

"Part of the department's budget cuts. We have eight Timekeepers more in need of the stronger stuff than I am. If I request it, they'll dock it from my pay. Six hours per cc. I can't afford it."

"I can."

She looked him in the eyes. "No."

"The more comfortable you are, the easier it will be for you to rest. You'll heal that much more quickly."

"Raymond: no."

"Caroline, it's not... personal." Leon halted at the word. No other way of putting it, even though he knew he was lying. "For the good of the division: you'd be back in the field that much more—"

"No." They both started at the force in her voice. She looked at him across the space of four breaths and added, with soft wonderment: "I think this is our first fight."

"I think you're right."

He gave her time to untense. This was, of course, by no means an interrogation; he had no desire to upset her further, to cause her any type of pain.

"It got in my eyes." Rawlins said, quietly. "I couldn't see. I had— His blood was in my eyes." Alone on the other side of the glass, she paused. "I don't think the doctors are telling me everything. Will I end up like him, Raymond?"

Opposite her, Leon stood silent.

Rawlins continued, her voice as flat as her expression: "They— of course they won't allow me access to my sidearm."

Normally, Leon thought of the idea of suicide either with contempt or as an everyday component of a society in which, for many, semi-immortality meant nothing more than extended existence, not actual living. He chose his words carefully. "You shoot yourself, Caroline. You scatter brain, bone, and blood around your quarantine area. This entails clean-up. Time and limited departmental resources spent on further containment."

Rawlins nodded; she bowed her head. "I just want to be in control when it happens."

"It won't happen. Your biometrics are looking good."

"I know." She swallowed, pressed her hand palm-out to the glass.

Leon hesitated. Then he placed his placed his hand over hers. The glass was cool and dry against his fingers and palm.

"Thank you for visiting me, Timekeeper Leon," Rawlins said quietly.

"You're welcome, Timekeeper Rawlins." Leon tipped his forehead to the glass and added, softly: "Rest, Caroline. Sleep. Will you do that for me?"

"I will, Raymond."

He smiled for her a gentle smile the cameras couldn't see, not at their proximity, the respective angles of their faces, and left the surgery.

#####

#####

When he returned to the main hall, and to Interrogation, his true witness had received her guardian from Social Services. More importantly, she was calm enough to talk about what had happened in that corner flat on the ghetto's east side.

The girl— Rebecca Jackson, her name was (not that it mattered all that much: she, of course, had no record)— was eight years old. Blonde, gray-eyed, as dirty and skinny as any other urchin from the ghetto. As dirty and skinny, Leon had to admit, as he had been at that age. She was in one of the main-floor interrogation rooms in the company of her assigned social services worker, a tall, solid, chestnut-haired woman whose expression was simultaneously impassive and nearly palpably contemptuous. The contempt, said her stone-green eyes, tracking Leon as he entered, was solely for him. As for Rebecca Jackson, she took one look at Leon, scowled and teared up, and pressed her face into the social worker's side.

He could get nothing out of her. Not a word. Leon wasn't a big man, and he didn't think of himself as particularly imposing, but the girl was obviously frightened of him. He chalked it up to shock. As he left the room, frustrated but not wanting to show it in front of Rebecca's impassive protector, Jaeger touched his arm.

"Let me try, Raymond."

"What makes you think she'll talk to you?"

"It's your eyes."

"I beg your pardon?"

"You have scary fucking eyes." As he spoke, Jaeger shrugged out of his great coat. "That ice-blue thing? Frightening."

Leon frowned. "Frightening?"

"Can be." Jaeger folded his coat over a chair, unzipped his stab-vest.

"No one's ever told me that before."

"That's because they're _scared_ of you, Ray." Jaeger placed his stab-vest on the chair-back over his coat. He turned, met Leon's eyes with the wry sobriety of someone who'd just imparted a truth long apparent to all but the present recipient, and, in his pale-iris uniform shirt, entered the interrogation room.

#####

#####

All told, Jaeger, for all his gentleness, patience, and lack of fright-value, had little more luck than Leon. All he could get out of the girl called Rebecca Jackson (before the woman from Social Services shut down the questioning, per Miss Jackson's rights as a minor under the age of eleven), was "Uncle Lem gave Daddy and Mommy time, and he took time for himself, and they all died." Said statement, and a half dozen variations thereof, all digitally recorded and preserved.

_Gave time,_ Leon thought. Shared time wrist-to-wrist, most likely. Wrists that, for lack of better phrasing, were no longer there.

From his desk in the ward room, he checked in with Barnes on Forensics' progress with the remains from the switchyard and the crash, and learned that neither Barnes nor any of his people had found traces of any but the normal panoply of street drugs in either the body from the switchyard or the pilot, who had in his system a semi-licit stimulant when he died. Not were they likely to find anything other than standard-issue illicits in the bodies from the ghetto. Which seemed to place their deaths in the realm of pathogen or disease, not chemicals. But if this were a disease, why wasn't it spreading more quickly?

And then Leon realized: _"Uncle Lem" gave Rebecca's parents time_.

Gave, and then sampled some for himself. From his own stash, so to say.

The "illegal time" Leon's first contact, the dead man in the switchyard, was talking about: Lem had been dealing it. He'd sold it to Rebecca's parents; he might well have dealt it to others.

A phrase came to Leon's mind. More than that, the expression, the sarcastic smile, with which it had been uttered: _Clean living_.

Laura Vedder.

He sat forward, snatched up the receiver of his desk phone, tapped in the extension for Intake.

_Barring_, said a man's voice, a pick-up on the third ring. _Intake. How may I help—_

"Timekeeper Raymond Leon. I'm looking for a temporary inductee named Laura Vedder. Is she still in the building?"

_Hold, please, Timekeeper—_ Followed by thirty seconds of silence. Thirty seconds of Leon, knowing what Barring was about to tell him, muttering _damn it, damn it, damn it_ beneath his breath—

_— She's just left. Afraid we took our time processing her. _Citizen groups and their bloody complaints about illegal arrests, the length of warrantless detention: Barring's tone was rife with apology._ If there's a problem—_

"Thank you, Barring."

Leon hung up. He got up, grabbed his great coat from the wall hook behind his desk, and ran for the doors leading out to the street. Almost certainly, Laura Vedder hadn't time enough for a taxi back to the ghetto. With luck, he'd catch her before she could board a bus or a train.

Before she could disappear.

#####

#####

#####


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N:** Almost feel like doing a general shout-out: _Is there anybody out there...?_ (Ahh, the risks— and obscurity— of the "Miscellaneous" tag...!) If you _are_ out there, and you're reading this, I hope you're enjoying this thing. Thanks for showing up!

#####

#####

Out the outer doors Leon went, pushing through the leftmost of the heavy, alloy-infused glass panes; he took the downflight of stairs at a half-run. The last of the long winter dusk had shaken free of entrapping crystals of smog and fled west after the setting sun. Yet another thin dirty rain was beginning to fall. From a pool of light cast downward from a reinforced steel sconce mounted high on the wall of Temporal Control, Leon looked into the darkness, toward the nearest subway stop one block ahead.

A voice from the shadows to his left said: "Did you really think I'd give up on her?"

Laura Vedder was standing in an alcove to the left of the stairs.

Leon was so surprised to see her that for a second all he could do was frown and ask: "Who?"

"Becca, of course. Rebecca Jackson," she added, speaking with a clarity normally reserved for the moderately slow. She stepped out of the alcove; her t-shirted shoulders flinched at the impact of raindrops. "The little girl you hauled in for questioning."

"What's your interest in her?"

"Are you really that stupid, or really that cold-hearted?"

Anger flared in him. A bright, hard flash of it, like a shock to his heart. "You're beginning to try my patience, Miss Vedder," he said. Her eyes replied that she didn't care in the least. "Would you mind stepping back insi—"

"She doesn't have anyone else. I'm not exactly the maternal type, but—"

"You thought you'd apply to adopt her." A dual-trains'-worth of people disgorged from the subway station, in singles, threads, and throngs. A popping of umbrellas, a rain-quickened shuffling along the sidewalk. Too quickly, he and Vedder were standing in a crowd. Leon nodded, now with open impatience, toward the doors of Control. "Will you come back inside, Miss Vedder?"

"Will you see that my application for her has at least a chance, Timekeeper?"

He replied, automatically: "I don't negotiate with drug addicts."

"You fucking hypocrite."

She stepped away, walked off, against the flow of foot traffic, toward the subway station. Leon went after her, caught up; he grasped her upper arm.

As she turned on him, the irritation in her expression darkened to anger. "Am I under arrest?"

"No."

"Then you'd better fucking let me go—"

"Miss Vedder. Please." Leon spoke as patiently as he could. As patiently, certainly, as he'd ever spoken to a civilian as patently insubordinate as Laura Vedder was. "You are not under arrest. You are, however, a person of interest. And you might be in danger—"

At that, worry replaced some of the indignation in her expression. "Danger—? How?"

Leon stopped himself from saying _I'm not exactly sure._ A display of uncertainty on his part would only fuel her willingness to be obdurate. He went, instead, with instinct and a best-available guess. "We need to test the skin on your forearm, near your timer. Will you come back inside, please?"

Vedder nodded. If nothing else, she'd be back in a dry, relatively clean environment, not packing herself, semi-soaked, into the filth of a subway car. Leon released her; she preceded him up the steps.

Just before he re-entered Control, Leon noted, from his peripherals, a variance in the flow of traffic near the subway station. On the street outside the subway station, a Timekeeper's cruiser slowed, shark-like, in passing. A car as primer-gray as Leon's, as any of them. Blockier, though, than Leon's. More blatant in displaying its power.

_Garner_, Leon thought. He followed Laura Vedder inside.

#####

#####

"Don't you ever rest, Raymond?" asked Carl Barnes, peering through the lenses of a pair of microscope-specs at the timer on Laura Vedder's right forearm. He was gently flaking skin cells from around the timer with an array of delicate scrapers; he might have been giving the woman a manicure, for all his seeming nonchalance.

"Don't you, Barnes?" Leon countered. Though he hadn't said as much to the man, Barnes was the only one he would trust with this, the sampling, the testing. Again, he was going on instinct. A sense, fueled by the crash involving Rawlins and the other Timekeepers, by seeing Garner at the switchyard and, a moment ago, outside the subway station (if, indeed, that _had_ been Garner— but, no, he had no time for doubt. Not just now.), that something was wrong _in here_ as well as out on the streets.

"Ah, but I have an excuse." Barnes caught Vedder's eye, winked at her. "Mistress Pain. We've learned to live with one another, but she _does_ tend to keep me up nights."

He went back to his sample-collecting. Leon and Vedder watched him drop bits of skin into phials of clear spin-down solution, press flakes to slides.

"And: there," Barnes said, as his chemicals and their attendant machines went to work. He glanced back at his audience. "If you're going to hover for this, Raymond, you might at least offer the young lady a cup of coffee."

"Coffee...?" Leon echoed, looking at Laura Vedder.

She smiled slightly for him. "Please."

She was shaking. Leon could see it. Again, her resemblance to Rawlins was almost uncanny. _Nerves, Leon,_ he thought, as he got up, went to the drinks dispenser in the hall outside the lab. On the way back in, he detoured to the science-level locker room, found a clean towel with which she could dry her rain-wet hair.

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"Whatever you may have been looking for, Raymond," said Barnes, "I think we've found it. Miss Vedder is not entirely herself."

He straightened away from the viewpiece of the microscope he was using; he flicked his fingers across the virtual keypad between the microscope and his monitor-bank; on the center screen appeared a rough-edged planetoid of an object, powdery gray-and-black against a pale blue background.

Leon leaned in for a look. "Artificial?"

"Of course." Barnes looked from Laura Vedder to Leon as he spoke. His expression was almost sympathetic. "Though I need hardly remind you that artificial skin is not, in itself, illegal."

"True." Patching, of various body parts, of varying quality, was inimical to a society that promoted artificial immortality. Still, actually finding the artificial skin was a revelation. Potentially an accusation. Leon looked to Vedder, too, as if his looking were enough to pin her in place, to keep her from fleeing. Unnecessary: she remained where she was, opposite him, on the other side of seated Barnes, her eyes on the screen.

She said, calmly, as if completing his thought: "It's what the skin conveyed: that's the problem, isn't it, Timekeeper?"

"You tested clean for illicit substances, Miss Vedder. Almost too clean. Yet you're on a work schedule that would seem to demand, shall we say, enhanced stimulation." Leon paused, waited until she met his eyes. "What was in that patch, Miss Vedder?"

"You have no proof that _anything_ was in that patch."

"We have no proof. And you are not under arrest."

"I think what the Timekeeper is finding difficult to say, Miss Vedder," Barnes offered, "is that your co-operation, much appreciated, could save lives."

She hesitated. Leon gave her time, as did Barnes, who finished his coffee as he sharpened the image on the screen.

"Baffin," she said, finally. "The dealer's name was Baffin. He sold us— he called it Double-Time."

She spoke to the screen as much as to Leon or Barnes, who, a moment later, had the cell in perfect clarity before them. In perfect clarity, too: a short series of alpha-numerical characters on the planetoid's equator.

"And there we have the marque," he said. "Anything else you need, Raymond?"

Leon looked, memorized. Pass-coded it into his pocket data-pad, just to be sure. GH78yyz0448. Enough to begin an inquiry of any of half a dozen skin-peddlers. Or one in particular.

"No, Carl, thank you." He added, frowning, as he ushered Laura Vedder to the door. "Encrypt those findings, would you? For now."

"I will do that." Barnes nodded Leon's way, above the glow of the monitor. "Good hunting, Raymond."

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He let her leave by the front entrance, allowed her time, even, to stop at the automated information kiosk for forms relating to the policies of the social services department regarding adoption. All things she might have done having not accompanied him to Barnes' lab, after having simply spent a few minutes outside after her initial interview, cooling her temper, composing herself. He drove his cruiser from the parking garage, trusted her to meet him a block away, around a corner.

She came walking up out of the rain a minute after the cruiser rumbled to a halt at the curb. Leon was too jaded to be pleased: by this point in his life, he felt almost disappointed when anyone belied his general lack of trust in humanity. Still, he felt a quiet relief when she opened the door and got in. Relief, he told himself, at the practicality of her compliance. No need for pursuit, re-capture. No risk of drawing unnecessary, potentially dangerous attention.

"You'll need to go someplace that isn't home," he said, as she shut the door. "Just for a day or two."

"I can't afford it," Vedder replied, simply.

"Fine." Three indirect kilometers from Control, Leon stopped at a Time Bank, drew fifty-six hours from his personal account. Not from his allowance through the Timekeepers' credit union.

He got back in the cruiser, offered Vedder the loaded Time Bar. She took it. "If I weren't so certain you were already in a committed relationship, Timekeeper," she said, as Leon eased them back into the eternal snarled flow of traffic, "I might think you were interested in me. Concerned about me, at any rate."

"It's not— We're not... committed."

"Ah." Knowing, smiling, her face lit by neon through the rain-streaked windshield. Thoroughly unconvinced. He saw it from the corner of his eye. She had, he knew, only just stopped short of calling him a bad liar. "I wasn't aware that Timekeepers were permitted such things."

Leon bristled, despite himself. "Of course we are."

"So you are committed not only to your duty and to the _system_—" —a soft, drawling emphasis there— "—but you're committed to— and I apologize for any assumptions regarding your sexuality— _her _as well_._"

"So everyone would have me believe," Leon muttered.

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He left Laura Vedder at an apartment building in the twisting streets of old Westwood. Waited, watching from the cruiser, until she'd called up to her friend's flat and was buzzed, ostensibly safely, inside.

Then he drove off downtown, to meet with Taymor.

Taymor the Organ Grinder.

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	6. Chapter 6

**A/N:** Welcome back, fight fans. Getting near to the end here: this chapter, and one more, and we're done. Comments (or, at this point, even hate mail) gladly accepted. Don't be shy. Heave back with that past-its-sell-by-date ostrich egg, that slimy head of cabbage, or that ol' rotten tomato, and let fly. In the meantime, thanks go out to the usual suspects (you know who you are) and to my parents, God rest 'em, who bought me a huge box of science-fiction paperbacks at an estate sale way back when, before the dawn of time. (Man, books were heavy in those days, back when "paper" meant "slabs of rock.") Love ya!

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Leon could spend the night shaking down skin-merchants. Could waste his time in a warren of back-room laboratories, amid the artificial cold and the stink of formaldehyde and refrigerated meat, while his questions met with silence, defiance, the odd concealed weapon, or outright flight. Or he could bypass the scummy middle (possibly sparing or saving a couple of lives in the process) and go straight to the source.

Like the empires of any of a number of other gang lords great and small, Balfour Taymor's world lay superimposed on Los Angeles like an invisible map. Leon headed directly for the epicenter of that world: one of the old studio complexes in the San Bernardino valley. Until the mid-twenty-first century, the studio had specialized in digital-effects production for television and film; following the collapse of traditional capitalism and, more locally, the cataclysmic earthquake of 2108 and the drought-driven cholera epidemic that followed, the complex, positioned as it was near the site of the first in the series of the valley's gargantuan artificial stabilization plates, had been largely abandoned. "Largely," until Taymor bought or drove out the remaining occupants.

Taymor was something of an exception among gang lords. More of a completist than a megalomaniac, more patient, certainly more intelligent than most. He possessed, in fact (or so Leon had heard), an advanced degree in genetics. Hence his vice of choice: the organ trade.

Even immortals couldn't live forever. The irony, there: Taymor understood and exploited it. Through physical trauma, toxins, glitches in what remained the chromosomes of humans, not gods, body parts could fail. And should the wait-time for legitimate replacement parts, grown legally from donor cells, prove too long, Taymor was there to help. For a price, of course.

Leon didn't doubt that the man, or his minions, engaged in morbidly illicit behavior. Even the speed-growth techniques that Taymor had devised for the rapid production of organs had their limits: when an order absolutely had to be filled, there was always the odd liver, heart, or spinal column one might _just_ _happen_ to find lying about in the ghetto. But Taymor was known not for his bloodthirstiness but for his pride in his work. Leon had heard it mentioned years ago (and now, years later, he recalled the mentioner as having been Carl Barnes): the man was a genius. Certifiably insane, perhaps, and a criminal, but a genius as well.

He drove in through the old studio gates, corroded but oddly well maintained (or not so oddly, if one were to take into account the amount of surveillance technology and booby-traps no doubt concealed amid the brush and the steel bars), and, unchallenged, unaccosted, continued straight on, past three city blocks of weathered outbuildings, to the northern wall of Taymor's keep.

The building had at one time been a soundstage, one of the largest in North America if not the world. Now it was a double-layered fortress: an exterior reinforced shell guarding the structures that contained Taymor's laboratories and, rumor had it, his personal living space. In the event of a full-on assault upon the complex, Taymor or his followers could flood the outer passages with nerve gas or target invaders from above with automatic weaponry or flamethrowers. Near a pair of doors huge enough to accommodate a fleet of semis or a jumbo passenger jet, Leon parked the cruiser. At a door sized for humans, and hence mouse-sized beside the first, he looked impassively up into the glossy black eye of a security camera.

He hadn't long to wait. Because he wasn't a threat— an invading force, a rival gang or an assault squad of Timekeepers— he was allowed to drive right up to the door. Because he was but one foolish man, that door— reinforced alloy, no doubt secured from within with half a dozen state-of-the-art locks— was opened to him.

Leon found himself facing a man who seemed to be half bearded lizard. A most unfortunate acne roughness to his skin, hair that, in the dim illumination of the entry seemed more green than wheaten.

"There's a toll, Timekeeper," he said. "Pay up."

"Of course."

Entering, Leon unzipped the forearm of his left-side coat sleeve. As he did, and as he stepped through the pale blue light of the metals- and bio-scan zone just inside the door, he cast a casually assessing look around. A semi-circle of men and women, all attentive but none of them displaying weapons. All hanging back, expectant looks on their faces.

The man who'd answered the door— Leon already found himself thinking of him as a boy— had to be new, then. In his greed for time he hadn't even bothered to take Leon's gun. He half-reached for Leon's arm, growling: "Hurry it along, old man."

Leon smiled slightly as he offered the boy his exposed wrist. Then, as the boy eagerly reached for it, Leon punched him in the gut. The boy grunted and doubled over, Leon twisted his left arm up and back, yanked the sleeve away from the boy's skinny wrist, and stole time from _him_. Took one exact hour, yanked his right knee hard into the boy's sternum, dropped him, and drew his sidearm. All in under seven seconds.

He leveled his automatic at the tallest and best-dressed of the men in the encircling group. "May I pass?"

"Well done, Timekeeper." The man chuckled, displaying teeth almost preternaturally white. His eyes, in contrast, were nearly a madman's black. He had long dark hair; he was casually unshaven, lean but not starved, carnally handsome. "Yes, you may pass. Right this way."

He gestured to the rear, behind himself; the semi-circle dissipated with the sweep of his long arm. Leon re-holstered his automatic and followed the man deeper into Taymor's keep.

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Level two. The interior of the fortress. Taymor's sanctum. Which, somewhat ironically, was far less dramatic than the outer keep. Was nearly less dramatic, in fact, than Carl Barnes' science realm back at Control. Through a triple set of security checkpoints (in place, more likely than not, simply for show: Leon, who was allowed to keep his gun throughout, had no doubt he could be cut to slide-grade slices by bullets, lasers, or razor wire on less than a second's notice), Leon followed the tall man called Gibbs (the name offered up, chattily, in passing, as Gibbs led him like a tour guide to their final destination in Taymor's lab area).

A century or so ago, Balfour Taymor might have been the head of an R&D team for any of a number of chemical companies producing wares ranging from hair dyes to nerve toxins. Had he not been a criminal mastermind, more or less, he might have earned points on an employment review for what could only be labeled a most old-fashioned work ethic. In short, he wasn't one for hanging back, for letting his people do all the grunt work. When Gibbs and Leon stepped out onto the upper level overlooking the main lab, even though it was past twenty-one hundred hours, Taymor was out on the floor, flanked by two lab-coated followers as he studied the screen of a data pad.

Gibbs tapped a transmitter on the lapel of his charcoal sharkskin jacket. "Mr. Taymor, we're here."

Below them, Taymor looked up. Smiled as he might smile upon spotting an old school chum, pointed back along the level on which Gibbs and Leon stood.

"He'll see you in his office, Timekeeper," Gibbs translated. "Follow me."

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His work ethic might have been prosaic, quaint, even modest. Balfour Taymor himself was anything but. He stood a leonine six-foot-plus. White hair swept back off a high forehead, unapologetically, masculinely handsome. A build better suited, it might seem, to heavy construction work than to genetics. And then there were his eyes. Pale yellow, on first look. Gold-flecked, upon closer examination, until the viewer realized that those flecks were the light catching in the crystal facets of artificial irises. The irises of eyes that Taymor had designed, built, and implanted in himself. All the better with which to see the world, in all its microscopic and macroscopic glory, in all its darkness and light, in all its opportunity and potential betrayal.

He left his lab coat hanging on a hook at the foot of the stairs below. In his office, which, in its array of active data screens, notebooks, and workaday clutter perpetuated the illusion of a man more interested in making himself useful to science than in being a master of the underworld, he shrugged a perfectly tailored steel-gray suit coat over the breadth of his white-dress-shirted shoulders. "Thank you, Mr. Gibbs."

"Mr. Taymor." Gibbs nodded and left.

"A drink, Mr. Leon?" Balfour Taymor asked.

"Very kind of you, Mr. Taymor," Leon replied.

The reality of the situation, or the surreality, wasn't lost on him. Fact: he was face-to-face (or face-to-back, as Taymor crossed to a simple black-oak drinks cabinet, removed two glasses and a bottle, poured) with a known criminal. Fact: he was still in possession of his sidearm.

Fact: he had come without a warrant, in search of information.

Fact: he would be dead a thousand times over were he to harm Taymor now.

And fact: in putting on his suit jacket, in extending hospitality, in turning his back to Leon, Taymor had snared him, casually and elegantly, in the strictures of civil protocol. Shooting a man who'd just invited you in and offered you a drink constituted a repellent act of barbarism by any standard.

Taymor returned from the drinks cabinet with two short-stemmed cut-crystal glasses, red-gold liquid sparkling within. He offered a glass to Leon.

"Brave of you to come here, Mr. Leon," he said, as Leon took the glass. "And so: courage."

Leon nodded, sipped as Taymor sipped, found himself tasting a brandy far beyond the ken of typical immortals. Taymor seated himself behind a pragmatically jumbled desk, offered Leon a seat in a leather-bound chair opposite. This Leon declined.

Taymor nodded mildly. "What can I do for you, Timekeeper?"

Before he replied, Leon took another savoring taste of his brandy. It had occurred to him, also, that in offering him a drink, Taymor might well have offered him poison. Still, in doing so, the geneticist wouldn't, in turn, have broken the rules of polite engagement: a brandy this good was very nearly worth dying over. "I'm in the market for skin patches capable of fooling a wearer's wrist-clock."

"Fooling to what end?"

"The introduction of a substance that mimics time. Where would I go for such a patch?"

"Why, here, of course, Timekeeper. Then, you already knew that or we wouldn't be having this conversation."

"Who have you sold them to, Taymor?"

"Mmm." Taymor smiled, examined the elixir in his glass. "Freedom, Raymond. We all dream of it. And what, for us, for all of us, is real freedom?"

"Tell me."

"Living off the clock, of course. Even for a moment. Even if that moment ends in death."

"Conveniently bypassing said mention of death, is that how your dealers are marketing Double-Time on the street?"

Like a flame flickering in a draft, surprise betrayed itself momentarily in Taymor's yellow eyes. "Not exactly. It's a very limited market, actually."

"How limited?"

"My old brain forgets, Timekeeper."

"An easier one, then: who bought the skin patches from you?"

"Mmm. Not just 'bought.' The purchaser requested that they be engineered from scratch. My lab people are— with good reason— quite proud of them."

"And said purchaser was who—?"

"Forgive my sensitivity, Mr. Leon, but it's late, and I begin to grow weary of your tone."

"You're afraid, Taymor. It must be someone big."

Taymor smiled. "Gargantuan. Monstrous. As... _huge_, even, as you, Leon." He rose, crossed back to the drinks cabinet, poured himself another drop of brandy. "Let's just say you've strayed a bit far afield." He met Leon's eyes, casually, eerily, very directly. "Tell me, though, Timekeeper Leon, before you leave: do things really smell as sweet as they should at home?"

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Frustrated, at the lack of information, at the implications, at the fact that he'd surrounded himself with criminals he was powerless to arrest, coming here as impulsively (that is to say as alone and, by extension, as stupidly) as he had, Leon, now unaccompanied, left Taymor's inner sanctum and once more crossed the outer zone of the keep, sensing, now, all around him, forearms bearing bio-clocks bloated with stolen time. Via drugs, alterations to metabolism, theft, threat, and outright murder. He was nearly to the door leading back out into the dirty San Bernardino winter night when a woman with bleached-white hair and kohl eye-makeup stepped in front of him and held up her left wrist, her time-clock obscured beneath a black web glove. "Show me yours, Timekeeper," she purred, "and I'll show you mine."

A hulk of a man with a scarred face and an artificial right eye (easy enough to tell: its pupil glowed laser-red in the gloom) joined her. He sneered openly at Leon. "He's not carrying enough time to make it worth the stealing, Nell. Public servant, isn't he? His pay's shit."

"Manners, Torsten." Gibbs' voice, from Leon's left. Gibbs himself blocked Leon's way a moment later. "If you'll pardon me, Timekeeper, Mr. Taymor has instructed me to send you on your way with his kind regards."

Before Leon could respond, he was grabbed from behind. From both sides, then, before he could stomp, elbow-slam, or head-butt a response. Thrashing, he was taken to the floor by dozens of hands, held down, pinned. His sleeves were unzipped, ripped, tugged up.

Pulling up his own left-side sleeve, Gibbs looked down at him. "A gift, Timekeeper."

_This is it,_ Leon thought. _It's all over_. He was an idiot for coming here. For coming alone, yet. The men and women holding him down made space enough for Gibbs to kneel beside him; Gibbs pressed his wrist to Leon's, a classic position of time-transference, of theft. Leon stared coldly at the man's face and waited for the shock of time-out.

The shock never came. His heart kept beating. Gibbs stood, straightened away. The look of confusion that must have been on Leon's face elicited a rippling of derisive laughter from those holding him. They released him a moment later. He got to his feet, looked at his arm. Eight hours had been added to his clock.

"For wasting your time," said Gibbs, drolly polite, "with Mr. Taymor's apologies." More laughter.

Leon left.

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He didn't return to Control. He was nearly home, angry, shaken despite himself, in need of food, a shower, and sleep, when a bulletin beeped through on the cruiser's radio: the report of an explosion in a ghetto block. Which in itself might not have interested him, only the address matched that of the apartment building in which Laura Vedder and Rebecca Jackson had lived. Leon switched on his grill flashers and his siren and accelerated, letting the traffic part before him.

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"Gas explosion. Faulty connection on five," was all he got out of the soot-smeared fire chief at the scene. A best guess, Leon knew. Likely to remain so, since a fire in the ghetto was unlikely to rate a full investigation. What it meant, for Leon's purposes, was the near-total obliteration of the flat in which Rebecca Jackson had lived with her dead parents; what it amounted to was the near-total collapse of the building itself, which, by definition, included the destruction of Laura Vedder's flat, too.

Somehow, he was completely unsurprised to find Aron Garner at the scene, leaning against the hood of his cruiser across the way, watching casually as the LAFD fought to keep the inferno confined to a single block. It was raining yet again, spastically. The heat from the fire raised steam off the wet pavement as Leon threaded his way over to the man, through police cars, emergency vehicles, bystanders, and those displaced from their sorry homes.

"What are you doing here, Garner?" he asked.

"I was in the neighborhood. Routine." Garner smiled companionably. "You, Leon?"

Leon didn't reply. Garner looked up, whistled softly as another segment of the apartment building's roof collapsed, sending a ragged shower of sparks into the wet night sky.

"I hear it took out the whole floor where they found your bodies, Leon," he said. "Too bad."

The bodies of Rebecca Jackson's parents, and their dealer. The one who had, ostensibly, provided them with Double-Time.

The whole floor as well.

Where Laura Vedder, Leon's only witness other than Rebecca Jackson, had lived.

_He thinks she's dead,_ Leon realized. He recalled Taymor's casual parting shot: _Do things really smell as sweet as they should at home?_

"Isn't it?" he replied.

Let Garner keep thinking that Vedder was dead. Let him keep thinking it until tomorrow, at least. Leon left the scene of the inferno and went home, to rest and recharge and do some thinking of his own.

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	7. Chapter 7

**A/N:** Okay, time for the excuses. (And for the thanks, too, to all of you who've commented on this beast. Appreciation, felicitations, and big smiles all 'round!) This was supposed to have been the last chapter, but (a) it ran long, (b) someone requested a cameo (YES, I DO REQUESTS. But not balloon animals: my niece does those.), and (c) well, you'll see. Let's just say I am a sucker for a certain time-honored convention of pulp fiction. Anyway, thanks for sticking around. Enjoy!

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Leon was in early the next day. Six thirty-five, with the bruised darkness still pinning the sun beneath the eastern horizon. He clocked in, checked his messages, carried an old black mug to the break area for a cup of the hot brackish liquid that passed for coffee. Left the mug, unfilled, on the counter next to the dispenser and walked all the way back to the infirmary, where, for ten minutes, he stood outside the quarantine glass and watched Caroline Rawlins sleep.

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On the way back to the ward room, he passed the vehicles and equipment dispatch. Kenbra Ellis, the short, blocky, brown-buzz-topped queen of materiel and requisitions, called to him from the office-cage out front: "Leon."

Leon drifted over. "Yeah, Ken?"

"You didn't clock in your cruiser last night. Hot date?"

"Not quite." Leon allowed himself a trace of a smile at the wry spark in Ellis's hazel eyes. Or they'd been hazel, Leon imagined, once upon a time. Seven decades of pigment dispersal had left Kenbra Ellis with irises a near-emerald green around the pupils, a russet red near the sclerae. Disconcerting. Leon recalled Jaeger's comments regarding the fright-value of his own eyes and felt a second of something akin to sympathy. "Dock it off my time for today."

"Already docked, Officer Leon." Ellis added, as Leon turned to walk away: "By the way— Garner was looking for you."

Leon paused in mid-stride, didn't quite look back. "Thanks, Ken." A thought, abrupt: _Looking for me— or for the cruiser?_ "I'll see what he wants."

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Back at his desk, Leon called up the current dispatch log. According to the data on his monitor, Garner was in the field; the geo-positioner placed his cruiser in a quadrant on the north end of town. Well away from the house where Leon had left Laura Vedder last night. Leon had seen no message from Garner when he clocked in; he saw no such message in his in-box now.

He did, however, see a note from Carl Barnes:

_I've something to show you, Raymond. When you've had your breakfast, come down to the lab._

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The science shift, technically, didn't begin until eight o' clock. Barnes was alone in the lab. Leon found him much as he and Laura Vedder had left him last night, seated in his semi-circle of monitors, manipulating data via air-pad as he peered at a screen.

"It's really true, isn't it?" Leon asked, approaching. "You _don't_ sleep, do you, Carl?"

"When I sleep too long, I dream; when I dream, I dream of _her_. My wife," Barnes added, by way of explanation, looking up from his monitors with an apologetic smile. "We live so long, Raymond, that we become our own ghosts." He met Leon's eyes; Leon felt, as if via telepathy, a jolt of sadness. He looked away, down. Amid the data pads and samples in Barnes' work space he saw not one but two half-empty mugs of coffee.

He cleared his throat as he picked them up. "Can I freshen one of these for you, Carl?"

"Thank you kindly, Raymond."

Leon was to the lab-level break-room and back within two minutes, with two fresh mugs of coffee. He kept one for himself; Barnes took the other, blew lightly at the steam emanating from the hot black liquid, sipped, spoke:

"I did a bit of reverse-extrapolation using those skin cells we gathered from Miss Vedder." He gestured to a spare chair; Leon pulled it closer, sat. "The drug doesn't so much clone time as it creates a feedback loop, so to say. Recycling the time already in the wearer's clock."

"For how long?"

Barnes arched his eyebrows, drank more of his coffee. "That I have yet to determine."

"So how is Double-Time killing people?"

"Is that what we're calling it? How very proletarian." Barnes set down his mug, motioned to a split-screen pair of images on the center monitor. The image on the left showed a half dozen or so blue-gray planetoids against a backdrop of spatial black. Flashes of light, like lightning as seen from the ionosphere through storm clouds, burst briefly on the planetoids' surfaces.

"Healthy clock-cells, Raymond," Barnes said. "Or so they appear. They're the artificial cells we collected from Miss Vedder. I took the liberty of tinkering with a few of them—"

"'Tinkering,' Carl?"

"Subjecting them to certain variables. The addition of extra time: they responded normally. Heat and cold: standard response. Chemicals, now: that's where things got interesting. Watch."

Until then, the image on the right-hand side of the monitor had been frozen. Barnes flicked the fingers of his right hand, and it came to life. For a moment, the image looked much like the image on the left: stormy planets as seen from space. Then the patterns of lightning-strike seemed, simultaneously, to intensify and to become static. They locked in, became less random. Where the light flashed on the surfaces of the planetoids, dark rifts began to appear and widen. The planetoids began to split apart. Finally, they burst into black tendril-like shreds. Barnes re-froze the image.

"The problem arises," he said, "when the clock freezes up. The loop continues, and it ends up feeding temporally off the user's entire body."

Frowning, Leon asked: "And what chemical causes the freeze-up?"

"At a guess, this early in the game, I'd say we're contemplating a whole family of delights, Raymond." Barnes looked across at him. "In a word: stimulants."

Leon paused with the rim of his mug just short of his lips. "_All_ stimulants?"

"Like I say, it's early in the game. I subjected the sample on the right to a pseudoephedrine-based compound—"

"Meth, Carl?"

"Yes, indeed. Right from my own personal cookery at home." Barnes snorted. "Or obtained, via official channels and the usual preposterous reams of paperwork, from Pharmacology: your pick, Timekeeper Leon."

"Apologies, Examiner Barnes."

"Accepted. Anyway, from what I can tell, fatal problems arise if the user— the Double-Time user— isn't clean— that is, if he or she has a stimulant in his or her system. The clock locks up, and the user suffers rapid aging— a most fatal rapid aging— without accompanying dessication. That is to say, the user's bodily fluids don't dry up; they age instantaneously, too, like the rest of the body. And then—" Barnes held his palms out to the cool air of the lab. "What is aging, really, other than a loss of cellular integrity? Here, the barrier between entropy and the user simply vanishes."

"And the user melts," Leon said.

Barnes shrugged. A jerk of his hunched right shoulder. "More or less."

Leon scowled. At the facts, the implications. Counterfeiting time was a heinous offense to begin with; adding a direct, fatal link to methamphetamine and God only knew what other stimulants, illicit or not, could make for a hell of a mess. Putting it mildly.

Barnes asked: "Should I forward this to Captain Wagner, Raymond?"

"Yeah, Carl." A hunch, then. A feeling. An ancient saying about walls having ears, something like that, flickered through Leon's mind. "But no one else for now, alright?"

Barnes nodded. "I'll let you know what he—"

"Examiner Barnes?"

A woman's voice. Barnes stopped speaking, looked. Leon did, too. Technician Lancaster stood just outside Barnes' semi-circle of monitors.

"I'm sorry to interrupt—" she said, looking from Barnes to Leon.

"You're in early, Lancaster," Barnes interjected, mildly.

"I just wanted you to know I'd have those Mayfair-district field reports to you by oh-nine-hundred. If that's acceptable."

"Quite, Elena. You know Timekeeper Leon?"

"Yes, sir."

"I've requested reports from Technician Lancaster," Leon said, rising. He extended his hand to Lancaster; she blushed slightly as she shook it. "Her work shows great attention to detail."

"Thank you, Timekeeper." Lancaster released him, drew back. "I'd better get busy."

Barnes watched her walk away; Leon watched him watch. Saw a quiet yearning in the man's eyes.

"Carl," he said, when Lancaster was well away, out of hearing distance, "have you ever thought—"

"— of re-marrying?" Barnes glanced up at Leon. "Women aren't looking to spend immortality with a cripple, Raymond." A sad, slight smile twitched at the corners of his mouth. "Can't say I blame them. Can you?"

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Another hunch. Before he returned to his desk, Leon went to the parking garage and erased the previous day's travel log from his cruiser's onboard computer. He might catch hell from Data Services for providing an incomplete accounting for the week, but the outdated CPUs in the cruisers were notoriously glitchy: the data might easily have gone missing on its own. Anyway, Leon had no official business to report. He'd merely provided a person of interest transportation to an alternate dwelling place.

That that person of interest had been Laura Vedder was something that Data Services— or Aron Garner— need not know. Nor did they need to know the location of Ms. Vedder's alternate lodging.

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#####

For the rest of the day, and the day following, consciously or subconsciously, Leon and Garner managed to avoid one another.

Leon, at least, had a legitimate excuse: four more deaths caused by Double-Time. Three involved ghetto-dwellers, two men and a woman, none of them known to Leon or, as far as he could tell, linked to Laura Vedder or to the family of Rebecca Jackson; the fourth was the son of a low-grade New Greenwich industrialist, a callow young bastard named Heath Boland who'd ostensibly come to the ghetto looking for dangerous new thrills. Well, he'd found one, alright. What was left of him was lying in its own puddle of gelatinous chunks in a rent-by-the-hour hotel room amid a littering of drug paraphernalia and empty liquor bottles.

And now the press had found the Timekeepers. Late that afternoon, Leon and Jaeger made it back to Control just ahead of a wave of reporters, who'd been tipped off by the dry cleaner to whom a street-dwelling opportunist, that is to say the pimp for the hookers with whom Boland had spent his last hours as an intact human being, had brought the unfortunate Mr. Boland's gore-encrusted suit.

"Christ, here they come," Jaeger muttered, watching the milling of civilians at the main entrance.

Leon shook his head. "Watch and learn, Timekeeper Jaeger."

At the doors, half a dozen security officers were allowing the reporters to pass, while politely but firmly accosting their accompanying media-people, making a show of searching equipment bags and wanding cameras with hand-held scanners. The reporters, in the meantime, were met halfway across the Main Hall by Captain Martin Wagner. He focused past the microphones being thrust at his face, ignored the cacophony of questions being leveled at him, and focused on a woman with ash-brown hair, wearing a gray pant-suit.

"Nancy," he said, in a voice that managed to boom in the hall without seeming to rise above speaking volume. "Nancy Becker. Thank God you're here."

Understandably, Becker looked confused. The other reporters shifted their attention from Wagner's towering, craggy self to her.

"What?" she said, for the benefit of her micro-recorder and at least a dozen enquiring stares.

"I have a story for you," Wagner replied.

Becker shook herself. "Of course you do. Captain Wagner, what can you tell us about the death of Hea—"

"No, no, no, Nancy: not that. The payroll crisis."

"What payroll crisis, Captain?"

Wagner looked from her to the rest of the reporters. "We might discuss this more comfortably in my office."

"We might discuss it more comfortably right here," replied a balded short man to Becker's left.

"Fine." Wagner continued, practically in a monotone: "Regarding the death of Mr. Boland, Temporal Control politely requests that the media respect the integrity of the investigative efforts of Timekeepers and our technicians in the field. Now," he added, with more volume, "regarding the virus sweeping the payroll programs of several major news outlets—"

"What virus might that be, Captain?" Nancy Becker asked.

"I'm sure you'd be one of the first to find out, Miss Becker." Wagner's eyes were now deathly cold. "You might run the story with a companion piece on the percentage of citizens living paycheck to paycheck. Or failing to do so."

Becker held his stare for a mere moment more. Then she broke eye contact, seemed to shrink in on herself. As she and several of the other reporters, doubt now in their faces, began to shift back, away from Wagner, the balded man asked: "Are you _threatening_ us, Captain Wagner?"

"That's a question better suited to your employers. Wouldn't you agree, Miss Becker—?"

Becker, now nearly in full retreat, didn't answer. With a cool smile, Wagner replied for her: "And so: no comment." He looked back at the remaining reporters. At the camera-handlers, too, now belatedly joining the fray. "Thank you for your time, ladies and gentlemen. And thank you for allowing us to do our jobs."

#####

Jaeger breathed out: "Hell."

"Simply doing what he's sworn to do, Terrence," Leon said. "His job is to facilitate _our_ job. To protect us in the performance of our duty. And he was merely pointing out a fact: these are precarious times. Disaster can befall any one of us."

#####

"Speaking of which—" Jaeger said.

He and Leon were at their respective desks in the ward room, finishing their field reports on Heath Boland and the day's other grisly findings. Leon looked up from his monitor screen, found Jaeger looking back at him.

"— I don't have to tell you how stupid you were to go and see Balfour Taymor all on your own. Not like you to be reckless, Raymond. What were you looking for?"

"Who told you I'd been to see Balfour Taymor?"

"Aron Garner. Said he'd heard it from Carl Barnes. Barnes had something he wanted to talk to you about; Dispatch tracked your cruiser to Taymor's place."

Leon felt himself go still. _Garner_.

_And Barnes._

And suddenly, too, a very simple question: _Who has the most to gain from Double-Time?_

On the streets, or even in the shadowy zone between government regulation and the whims of the rich, a drug that could mimic time might be worth millions of tradeable hours. Carl Barnes didn't need time. He needed a new spine. With the profits he could expect to make from Double-Time, he might well be able to afford one. Designed and engineered and grown for him by Balfour Taymor.

Leon glanced casually at the field stats scrolling up the left side of his monitor screen. Garner, it seemed, was once again in the field. "What's the going rate for SyStemX, Terrence?"

SyStemX was a powerful but non-addictive painkiller. Grade-A stuff. Something that someone from Pharma might have included on Rawlins' list of supposed unaffordables.

"On the street?"

"No. For Timekeepers."

"Time-free for active duty personnel, Ray. You should know that."

"Right— Are you sure?"

"One way to find out." Jaeger typed, tapped ENTER, scanned his results. "Shooting you the stats now."

A text file of the current drug benefits available to Timekeepers opened on Leon's screen. SyStemX was, indeed, free to those injured in the line of duty.

"They lied to her," Leon murmured.

"What's that, Ray?"

"Nothing, Terrence. Thanks for the data."

#####

Leon finished his field report, transmitted it to Wagner. Then he went, nearly at a trot, for the infirmary.

They— Garner, Barnes, whoever was behind Double-Time— were using Rawlins— and possibly Laura Vedder— as controls. Via the pilot in the jump-plane, they'd exposed Rawlins, as a secondary subject, to the drug. Now they were doing their best to keep her clean of other chemicals while they studied said secondary effects on her system.

Away from the Main Hall, he took the walkway to the infirmary at a run. Impatiently cleared the checkpoints, swept past the duty nurse at the desk in the quarantine area. And came to a dead halt.

Rawlins' room was empty. Cleaned out. Dark.

Leon's heartbeat seemed to catch in his chest. He took a deep breath, returned to the duty desk. "Timekeeper Rawlins: where is she?"

The nurse— thin, male, with pale skin and walnut-brown hair swept back off a narrow strip of forehead— regarded Leon with oil-black eyes. _S.J. Tyler, RN,_ his alloy name-bar read. "Officer Rawlins has been released to partial duty, sir."

"On whose order?"

Understandably, Tyler looked put out at Leon's archly disbelieving tone. "By the chief surgeon, of course, sir."

#####

Leon returned to his desk in the ward room. Rawlins, per the duty roster, had left for the day. She was due in tomorrow at ten hundred hours, where she'd be joining Kenbra Ellis in Requisitions until her medical restrictions were lifted. Garner, again, had pulled late duty, or so it seemed. Once again, he— or his cruiser— was somewhere north of Control. Barnes was out on a crime scene near Old Malibu, a run-of-the-mill homicide. Standard beat-and-drain, by the look of it. No big names. No melting bodies.

Jaeger had left a message for him. Leon clicked the flashing yellow dot, read:

_Going home. You should go home, too._

Leon leaned back in the heavy ancient frame of his office chair, thought. Regarding Double-Time, and Garner's and Barnes' potential involvement with the substance, what proof did he have? He couldn't demand the seizure of all of Barnes' files here at Control; even Wagner, theoretically good man that he was, wouldn't allow for so broad and unfocused a search for evidence. At any rate, Barnes likely had his data stored well away from either Control or his home. He knew the system as well as Leon, after all. Which left Leon, for now, with two known tangibles. Laura Vedder was one; Rawlins was the other. Leon needed to know that she was safe.

He left Control. Casually, by all outward appearances. Clocked his cruiser from "on-duty" to "off," as he'd neglected to do last night. Went home, took a quick shower, dressed in jeans, a comfortably worn gray-blue pullover, an old pair of boots. Walked to an all-night shopping mall near his flat, withdrew a few spending hours for himself from a banking kiosk at the edge of the food court, shoppers and foot traffic all around him. Positioned himself just so, between the screen of the kiosk and the security camera he knew was watching over his right shoulder, before he wired another forty-eight hours to Laura Vedder, care of the address at which he'd left her. Bought himself a bagful of food at the grocery anchoring the east end of the mall, left.

#####

For anyone who might be watching, Leon stuck to routine. His rent included underground parking; Rawlins' did not. Rather than expose his cruiser to street-level vandalism, he typically took public transportation to her place. Tonight was no exception. Grocery bag in hand, he disembarked from the bus at a stop half a block from her flat and called from a pay phone outside a mini-mart across from her building.

She picked up on the fourth ring. _Hello?_

Almost a shock, a terrible shock of relief, at hearing her voice. "Caroline?"

_Raymond, is that you?_

"Were you sleeping?"

_No. What is it? Has something happened?_

"No. No—" A stab of guilt, then, at the alarm in her tone. "I was think— I was just wondering— Is it Friday?" he finished, awkwardly.

_I'm sorry, Ray; I don't think I would be very good company tonight._

"It's alright, Caroline. I don't need you to be." Leon spotted a Timekeeper's cruiser idling at a stop light two blocks ahead; he turned his back to the corner, faced the neon and ads cluttering the front window of the market. "But, you see, this chicken won't keep."

_What chicken? Where are you calling from?_

"The mini-mart across from your apartment."

Leon glanced back toward the stop light. The cruiser had gone. He looked up to Rawlins' third-floor flat, saw her looking down through a drawback of the deep green curtains in the living area; he hoisted the bag of groceries for her to see. "Fresh chicken. Vegetables. Cook you dinner?"

Too far, and too winter-dark, to read her expression. But he could hear the tired smile in her tone. _I'll buzz you in._

#####

She closed and locked the door behind him; Leon put the bag of groceries on the kitchen counter. Rawlins stood watching him; like Leon, she was dressed for downtime, in charcoal track pants, a short-sleeved dark blue henley. Leon turned, looked into her weary eyes, reached to caress her bruised left cheek. He went to embrace her—

"No," Rawlins said.

Leon nodded. He'd presumed; he'd made an assumption. Rawlins was hurt; she had a broken arm: he'd crossed into her space. "Right. Sorry."

"No. No. It's okay." Rawlins smiled for him, laid her her hand against his jaw, kissed the corner of his mouth. Kissed him again, and again after that, very gently. "It's just that I'm so— Here. Don't move."

Leon stood still. With her good right arm, Rawlins embraced him, pressed herself carefully against him.

He felt her flinch. "Damn it," she hissed. She drew back slightly. "It's my ribs. Have you ever broken a rib, Ray?"

"Eight. Total. I think. I don't quite recall." Leon nuzzled her hair. "Hurt like a bitch, don't they?"

"Tell me about it." Rawlins eased away from him. In doing so, she ran her hand, in an affectionate rib-caress, along his side.

Paused.

Frowned, meeting his eyes. Traced with her fingers the outline of the holster strapped to Leon's torso, under his shirt.

Not part of their routine. Normally, the visiting party did not come armed. "Explain, Timekeeper Leon," Rawlins said.

#####

It wasn't his duty gun.

A matte-black Walther PPS. A gift from his father upon Leon's graduation from the Temporal Enforcement Academy, all those years ago. Leon Senior's way of celebrating his son's escape from the ghetto. An elegant, subtle weapon. And far more suited to conceal-carry than the high-intimidation-factor cannons Leon and Rawlins carried as Timekeepers.

Leon unholstered the Walther, laid it on the counter while he mustered utensils, spices, the cutting board, pans; he watched from his peripherals as Rawlins picked the gun up and examined it.

"I didn't want to stress you, Caroline."

"Tell me."

"The case I mentioned Friday: I think it involves someone at Control."

"Who?"

Leon hesitated. He had a butcher knife lying inches from his right hand. Rawlins had the Walther.

She placed the gun back on the counter, met his eyes. "You wouldn't be here if you weren't planning on trusting me."

"Garner. Possibly Barnes."

Rawlins frowned incredulously. "Carl—?"

"Yeah."

"Am I in danger? Are you—?"

He didn't give her the usual line about their lives being in danger every day that they served on the force. No need, with her, to waste time on the obvious. "I want you to keep your sidearm handy when I'm not here."

Rawlins nodded, then countered, drolly: "And when you _are_ here?"

Leon smiled. "We'll _both_ keep our sidearms handy."

#####

A variation in routine. Certainly a new breed of tension. They ate companionably but mostly in silence; as they finished the clearing-away, Leon caught Rawlins stifling a yawn.

She caught him looking. "I'm sorry, Raymond; I'm exhausted."

"No need to apologize, Caroline." Leon checked the locks on the apartment door, took a quick look down to the street from the window in the living-area, spotted no cruisers in the immediate vicinity. He walked back to the bedroom, sat on the edge of the bed, unlaced his boots, and asked Rawlins, when she appeared in the doorway: "Where do you want me?"

#####

She nudged him, gently pushed him, prodded him much as she would a spare pillow; he let her. Let her position herself with him in a way that would be most comfortable to her broken arm and ribs. He ended up, comfortable enough in turn, half-propped against the headboard with a pillow at his back. Rawlins relaxed against him with a sigh.

He reached for the low-wattage lamp on the bedside table. Paused. "Light on or off?"

She shuddered. He felt it. _Hours in the dark, covered in the pilot's remains, trapped in the wreckage of the jump-plane._ "On for now."

"Okay."

He settled back. Minutes passed. Leon, sinking gradually to a low-level doze, listened to the sound of traffic out on the street, to the relative quiet of the apartment, to Rawlins' deep, slow breathing.

"You'll have to do all the skiing," she murmured. "I'll do all the instructing."

Leon smiled, mildly surprised. "You heard that?"

"That was the idea, wasn't it? That I should have someone to listen to, to guide me back?"

"I suppose." He kissed the top of her head, stroked her short dark hair. "Go to sleep, Rawlins."

"You, too, Leon. Good night."

#####

#####

Another early morning. More dirty rain, more darkness. Leon left Rawlins sleeping. Made sure her clock was topped up, made himself a slice of toast and a cup of coffee, left a note on the kitchen counter.

_ Will stop by tonight. Take it easy.— R.L._

He anchored the paper under the slender bulk of the Walther and left Rawlins' apartment.

#####

#####

Leon swung by his flat, dressed in his duty clothes, armed himself with his field gun.

At Control, in the parking garage, he spotted Garner's cruiser. He parked two spaces down from it, away from the doors leading to the elevator; this way, should anyone be watching the feeds from the ramp cameras, he had an excuse to walk past it. In passing, he rested his palm for a moment on the primer-rough hood. Still warm. Leon glanced around. Unless someone was crouched between any of the other cruisers or hiding behind one of the concrete support columns, he was alone on the level.

He stepped to the driver's-side door of Garner's cruiser. Cameras be damned. If he hadn't lost his touch, this would only take a second.

Leon's keyring was a horseshoe of braided wire passed at both ends through a steel disc and anchored with screw-on caps. Leon unscrewed one cap, slid the keys from the wire, and slipped said keys, along with the screw-cap and the steel disc, into his coat pocket. He straightened the wire. Then, on a whim, before he jimmied the uncapped end into the door lock, he tried the handle.

It was unlocked.

Trust, on Garner's part? Hardly believable. Arrogance? Far more likely.

Or was this a trap? Leon didn't waste time wondering.

He slid into the driver's seat, switched on the cruiser's auxiliary power, brought up the log from the geo-positioning system. If not erased manually, the logs re-set at the end of the month, their data downloaded into Contol's mainframe.

Garner, it seemed, hadn't done his housekeeping. The data was intact. Leon scrolled back two days, three, four, five. Stopped. A set of coordinates, repeated, from the night the body of his contact was found in the switchyard.

And, in the here and now, the _thunk_ of the elevator-bay door closing.

Leon got out of the cruiser as Aron Garner approached. "You visited the switchyard twice on the night my contact was killed, Garner."

"It's about time you figured that out, Leon." Garner smirked. "You boys from the ghetto might be quick, but you're not very smart. Isn't that how it goes?"

As he spoke, he continued his advance; Leon unholstered and leveled his sidearm. "Stop."

Garner halted. Held his hands palm out, well away from his own gun. "I didn't kill him."

"You're lying."

"Not quite. Do you want to know who _did_ kill him? He's right behind you."

_Barnes_, thought Leon. A second too late.

Something heavy and hard slammed into the back of his skull, and the world went black.

#####

#####

#####


	8. Chapter 8

**A/N:** Well, this is it. REALLY-it. Featuring a nod to one of my favorite movies from a completely unrelated genre (and if you can guess what that movie is, you deserve a prize), here's the action-packed grand finale. Once again, thanks for being here. Hope it's been worth your... _oh, man, I just can't help it at this point_... time. (*ouch*)

Onward, yes...?

#####

#####

#####

They weren't downtown. Even before Leon was fully awake, he could tell. A dryness in the air. Dustiness outweighed the creeping, clinging sulfur-stink of smog. The salt-metallic tang of adrenaline, the scent of those who lived their lives perpetually desperate for time, the smell of the ghetto, was missing, too.

He was seated; he couldn't move. His skull was pounding, from the back forward. He opened his eyes, looked down at himself. His coat was gone, his stab-vest as well. His legs were bound. The sleeves of his duty shirt had been pushed up, and he was zip-tied, at elbows and wrists, with the latest ties issued to Timekeepers in the field, to the arms of a heavy wooden chair.

He had sixteen minutes and twenty-six seconds on his forearm clock.

_That wasn't right._

Leon was sitting ten feet from an open door of what must once have been the upstairs library of a mansion on Sunset. Empty shelves ladder-marched to the dusty shadows snagged in the cracks of the gray plaster ceiling. He was looking through the oak or maple uprights of a heavy bannister at a parallelogram of light inching its way up the faded olive of a stairwell wall. By the angle of the light, it was late afternoon. He'd been unconscious for most of the day.

From behind him, Aron Garner said: "He's awake."

"Good," a man's voice replied; and, before Leon's concussed brain had finished the realization—

— _It's not Barnes._—

— Anton Hurst stepped into his field of vision. Hurst, the triage pharmacologist.

"I gave you something to keep you out a little longer, Timekeeper Leon." Hurst's smile was as deferential as ever. His eyes, though, were shale-hard. "See, it's all about timing at this point."

"I'm leaving," Garner said. He joined Hurst. Leon turned his head to scan as much as he could of the rest of the room. No other occupants. A curious lack of debris: the house was purchased or leased, not derelict. A laptop, open, its screen faced away from where Leon sat, on a long dark-varnished reading table. A black technical satchel sitting open next to it. A field lamp, its rechargeable L.E.D.s casting cold, blue-tinged light to the corners of the room.

Garner grasped Leon by the hair, yanked his head around so that he was again facing forward. "Watch him," he said to Hurst.

"I will."

"I mean it. _Watch_ him. I'll call when I get there."

He walked out. Leon listened to the thud of Garner's boots on the stairs, descending. Heard the engine of a cruiser growl to life ten seconds later, behind him, outside and below.

He looked calmly up at Anton Hurst. "He's going back to Control, isn't he? You _do_ realize that the two of you kidnapped me in full view of at least four CCTV cameras, don't you?"

"And someday, maybe, the cameras on that parking level will be working the way they should. Right now, you might say, the picture they provide is somewhat incomplete." Hurst offered Leon a sympathetic smirk. "We took the liberty of running down your clock. Garner wanted to be brutal about it, but in the end we settled for simple theft." He examined the too-careful lack of expression on Leon's face. "You thought it was Barnes, didn't you? Carl enjoys his work; I daresay he enjoys his misery, too. Finds it romantic, in a way. Do you know what I enjoy? The thought of time. Thousands of hours. _Years_. Do you know how I'm going to get it?"

"By marketing Double-Time."

"Mm hm. And quite legitimately, too, I assure you. For the good of the force, even."

The last bit caught Leon ever-so-slightly by surprise. "How?"

"We— meaning you, of course— haven't time for a lengthy explanation, so I'll keep the historical precedent to a minimum—"

They hadn't removed his boots. A mistake. Leon could feel give in the ties around his ankles. He kept his eyes on Hurst, began to work at increasing the distance by which he could separate his feet.

"During the Second World War," Hurst continued, "National Socialist doctors invented methamphetamine as a way of keeping German soldiers fighting past the point of normal human exhaustion. Double-Time is my way of doing my humble bit to keep you poor Timekeepers working through the present— and continuing— scourge of budget cuts and staffing shortages plaguing Control."

"You're comparing us to Nazis."

"For the good of the force, Raymond. May I call you 'Raymond'?"

"No."

"Well, Raymond— You're always so arrogant, you know that? Always such a prick, and it's finally caught up to you.—" In the sterile light of the field lamp, Hurst's smile was less cadaverous than insectoid. "I estimated I could reduce the sleep requirement of the average Timekeeper to less than twenty-three hours per week, while cutting payroll expenditures by up to eighty per cent via the use of recycled time. An upgrade to the system, if you will, that would have been good for patent rights and a tidy bonus, if nothing else. Then there's the secondary market—"

"Where you'll see the real profits. You and Garner." Give, now, in the frame of the chair itself. Leon, systematically tensing and untensing his shoulders and arms, could feel it. "Been providing you with plenty of subjects for field tests, hasn't he? Couldn't very well have people exploding and melting and dying right in the lab at Control. That's what happened to my informant, isn't it? He found out about the tests—"

"Mm hm." Hurst checked his watch. "Speaking of Control, Garner should be nearly there. Which leads to the true problem of the evening: it seems I've lost one of my primary test subjects."

"Laura Vedder."

"Where is she, Raymond?"

"You're going to kill her. You're going to kill me, too."

"You're going to _die_, Timekeeper." Hurst glanced down at Leon's arm clock. "There's a difference."

Eight minutes, thirty-three seconds, glowing green beneath Leon's skin. Thirty-two. Thirty-one.

"A hundred years," he said.

Hurst frowned, bemused. "What?"

"A full century." Leon coolly met his eyes. "That's how much I want."

Hurst looked blankly at him. Then he laughed. "And Garner said you couldn't be bought. The _incorruptible_ Raymond Leon."

Chuckling, he walked off, behind Leon. Leon didn't bother turning his head to track him. He concentrated, instead, on flexing against the ties binding his arms and legs. When Hurst returned a moment later, he carried the handset of a military-issue com-sat phone. A reason, then, for their being on the second floor of the house: while the phone was essentially trace-proof, it required as little structural interference as possible. Likely something in the frame of the house— an earthquake-proofing retrofit, maybe— blocked the signal downstairs.

"Who should I call for you, Raymond?" Hurst asked.

"Jaeger."

Hurst dialed, held the handset to Leon's ear. "Here's hoping he hasn't gone home for the day."

One ring. Two.

_Timekeeper Jaeger._

"Leon here."

_Ray, where the hell are you?_

"No time, Terrence. I need you to do something for me."

_Shoot_.

"Laura Vedder. I need you to check on her, make sure sure she's okay—"

_I don't even know where you're keeping her._

"Go alone. No one else. That's all."

Hurst terminated the connection. Stared at Leon with cold anger in his pale eyes. In so few words, Leon had just alerted his field partner to the fact that something was wrong. That Vedder was in danger. Leon, himself, as well. And that— in telling Jaeger to go alone— at least one Timekeeper was in on what was happening.

"What did you think you were doing, Timekeeper Leon?" Hurst sneered. "Buying time?"

Leon glanced at his arm clock. Five minutes, thirty-eight seconds. "After a fashion, yes."

"Allow me an indulgence of my own," Hurst said. "As long as you're insisting on denying me _one_ test subject—" He dialed another number on the sat-phone, waited. "Garner, kill Timekeeper Rawlins."

He hung up, returned his attention to Leon. "Doubt she'll be much trouble, given the shape she's in. Which leaves me with you." He looked at Leon's forearm. "Five minutes," he mused. "I could wait for you to time out, or— What do you say to a demonstration of Double-Time? Since you've loosed my lab rats, I'd say you owe me."

He went to the reading table. Leon this time turned his head to watch, using the tracking of Hurst's movement as an excuse to twist as hard as he could, through the shoulders, chest, and arms, against the ties. Still not enough give. The new alloys were entirely too efficient. Too damned strong.

From the field bag, Hurst took out a hypo kit. A smoke-gray, semi-opaque bottle bearing an insignia Leon recognized as one popular among dealers with ties to Balfour Taymor. Irony, there. "The wonderful thing about old-fashioned methamphetamine, Raymond," Hurst said. "You can smoke it, you can ingest it, you can inject it." He fitted a fresh needle to the hypo, drew a syringeful of clear liquid from the bottle.

Leon began to sense a bit of play between his right forearm and the arm of the chair. "You inject me with that, a standard stimulant, and then fit me with a Double-Time patch: correct?"

"Correct. Double-Time attacks the stimulant in your system— almost as if the meth is a sort of time-virus— and you hyper-age. You melt, Raymond. You die."

Leon felt as much as heard a quiet cracking from the chair's right-side arm.

"After that," Hurst continued, packing away the remainder of the hypo kit, "we'll merely have to tweak the drug-interaction warnings. Safe usage shouldn't be a problem for our stalwart Timekeepers, as clean-living as they are. The hedonists in the general public will take their own chances."

_You talk too fucking much, Hurst,_ Leon thought. A loosening within the chair's frame itself, the wood as old and as dry as it was, starting from the right. But still not enough—

Hurst turned to Leon, syringe in hand, and asked:

"Are you clean, Timekeeper?"

Leon stared up at him. "The real question is, Hurst: are you?"

With that, he got his feet under him and, chair and all, bowled into Hurst. Hurst, knocked backwards, went out the door of the library; with a shout of panic, he went over the bannister. Leon, stumbling, unable to stop his own forward momentum, hit the bannister, too. The brittle uprights gave way. Chair and all, Leon broke through—

A timeless moment of free-fall. A flash-by of green painted wall, a welling of shadow—

A brutal tumbling. A crunch-and-shattering. A sudden, eerie stillness and the settling of dust.

Leon stirred. The chair legs had snapped off; from his own right leg, from the knee down, he felt a punching, throbbing pain. Hurst was lying maybe ten feet away, his back twisted at an unnatural angle. They'd landed on black-and-white tiled flooring. A wet, labored gurgling was issuing from the man's throat.

_His neck is broken._

Leon had seconds at most. And his arms were still tied to that damned chair. He got to his feet, against a stab of protest from his right knee, threw himself backwards into the nearest wall. Heard a splintering from the back of the chair, pulled simultaneously, as hard as he could, against the right side arm. Shouted in pain when the arm gave way and his shoulder dislocated, simultaneously, with an audible _pop_.

He dropped to his knees beside Hurst. Hauled the man over, back-flat, on the floor, and grasped his right forearm. Waited, heart pounding, for the pulsing flow of time-transference.

The gurgling from Hurst's throat stopped.

Leon looked to the clock on the man's forearm. Watched in the mounting darkness as it faded from glowing green to a dead-cinder red.

Hurst had died with over a day on his arm. Leon had less than two minutes on his own.

One minute, forty-six seconds.

Hurst had to have driven himself to the house; he had to have a car parked somewhere on the premises; that car, likely a cruiser, would have a temporal top-up cradle. Two questions: Where were his keys? And how far away was the car?

One minute, forty-one seconds.

No time.

The field bag upstairs. Double-Time. The demonstration Leon had interrupted.

Leon hauled himself back to his feet, hopped and staggered for and up the stairs. Fell when his right knee gave out, dragged himself upward, crawling. Got himself upright in the doorway of the library and as much as launched himself across it, at the reading table.

He tipped the field bag on its side. Emptied it. Pawed his way through medical equipment, phials filled with liquid, a scattering of micro-drives. Came at last upon a rectangular black plastic case, very thin, about four inches on its long side, latched. Opened it and found, inside, a layering of skin-like patches, separated by what looked like cellophane. He peeled away the top patch.

Forty-two seconds on his arm.

He pressed the patch over —.0041.

His clock stopped, still glowing green, at —.0038.

Then: a rushing. Not just dizziness, a sudden loss of equilibrium. It was as if Leon were standing still and the world was flying by, on the sides, above, below. He staggered, gripped the edge of the table top, held on.

It passed. Fortunately. Leaving only the pain in his shoulder and leg, a generalized unsteadiness. His clock was still frozen at thirty-eight seconds.

_For how long?_

Up to an eighty per cent reduction in payroll expenditures, Hurst had said. Meaning what? An accounting exercise? Actual measurements of real-time?

Leon dragged himself back down the stairs. Stopped long enough at Hurst's body to learn, via a patdown of the man's pockets, that if he had a car, the keys were elsewhere. He limped to the front door of the house, keeping in mind the direction from which he'd heard the sound of Garner's car's engine, and stepped out into windy dusk.

Old Sunset. That was, in fact, where they were. He knew from the steepness of the hills, the road winding away below, the angle of the glow lingering in the west. A gravel drive led to outbuildings on his right. Leon hobbled along it as fast as he could, found tire tracks leading up to a closed, unwindowed garage door. The door was unlocked.

The cruiser he found inside the garage wasn't.

Dusty tools peg-boarded to the garage wall. A claw hammer. Leon smashed the driver's-side window of the cruiser, got in, fumbled for the radio. He could feel his blood rushing in his veins, heard a ringing in his ears. He knew, without looking, that his clock had once again started to run.

He could barely speak. "Control, come in."

_This is Control._

Leon placed his forearm in the top-up cradle. "Timekeeper Leon, requesting per diem."

_Acknowledged, __Timekeeper_.

He watched his arm clock as the numbers mounted, flashed to twenty-four green-glowing hours, and began to count down. The standard-pace, everyday bleeding away of seconds. But he was still unsteady. He was hurt, and he knew it. He could feel his heart shaking his sternum.

"Control—"

— not even waiting for the acknowledgment—

"— Timekeeper Leon, requesting assistance—"

Leon blacked out.

#####

#####

They got a read on his location via the per diem. Tracking the time: that's what Timekeepers did, after all. A handful of officers responded to the house on Sunset, Jaeger among them. When Leon refused medical attention at the scene, Jaeger insisted on driving him back to Control. Leon didn't argue it. They passed Carl Barnes pulling up, _Temporal Control Forensics Services_ stamped in gold on the driver's-side door of his black Chrysler 300, as they turned out of the gravel drive.

Leon asked the question he'd been saving for his field partner. "Rawlins?"

Jaeger might have been waiting for it. Not a moment's confusion. He might have been reading Leon's thoughts. Given half a chance, field partners could be like that. "Have to say, even fucked up, the woman's a hell of a shot," he said. "Garner kicked in her door, and she shot him through the eye. With an old Walther. You know anything about that, Raymond?"

Leon didn't reply. Kept his gaze focused on the nightscape flashing by the side window until his drug-tweaked brain forced him to look away.

"The video feed from her flat was down," Jaeger continued. "If he'd killed her, we might never have known who it was. Elena Lancaster, you know her?"

"One of Barnes' people."

"Looks like she was in on this. Asked a friend of hers in data services to shut down the feed, there and from the cameras on P3, and he did it. Looks like he was in on it, too."

Leon, in pain and relief, sank into the passenger seat. Asked, nonetheless: "Were you in on it, Terrence?"

"Do you want to walk all the way back to Control?"

Leon focused silently on the relative stillness of the glove-compartment door.

Jaeger said: "I'm not gonna say I'm angry at you for not trusting me on this."

"But you _are_ angry."

"I am. I'm not gonna say it, though." Jaeger kept his eyes on the twisting road. "What I am gonna say is this: You keep running ahead, Raymond. You don't wait. You run on ahead, because that's what you do: you get all caught up in the chase. And someday you're going to get too far out, and there won't be anyone there to help you. Not me, not anyone." Jaeger glanced over, saw Leon opening his mouth to speak. "And before you deny it: we all need someone sometimes, Raymond. We all do. Even you. Tonight should be proof enough of that."

#####

#####

For exposing Hurst and his plans to develop and market Double-Time, Leon received a commendation and a modest bonus, which said bonus was just enough to cover the fines he incurred for ingesting an illegal substance while on-duty (said substance being, of course, the Double-Time patch that had saved his life) and for lending an unapproved firearm to a fellow Timekeeper, with just a bit left over.

#####

Laura Vedder's housing status was restored. Leon told her Carl Barnes was responsible. He liked to think she nearly believed him.

#####

#####

Caroline Rawlins, Timekeeper. Eyes alert, her facial expression mildly troubled but relaxed, too. Wearing today, on her downtime, over the flex-cast on her left arm, a lavender-check button-down shirt and taupe cargo trousers, and clutching, in the fingers of her good right hand, the handles of a cluster of white plastic bags from the Thai takeaway down the street. The woman couldn't cook to save her life, or anyone else's, and she knew it. Raymond Leon knew it, too. He saw Rawlins on the feed from his flat's security cam.

Rawlins asked, when he opened the door: "It's Friday, isn't it?"

It was, in fact, Tuesday.

Leon smiled for her. "It's close enough, Timekeeper Rawlins."

He was still moving about on a cluster of torn ligaments in his right knee; he hobbled in allowing her to pass. His shoulder was still dicey, too. But time healed everything, right? Time, and a good leg-brace, and close adherence to the protocols of physical rehab. Leon closed the door, checked the locks, and followed Rawlins to the kitchen.

#####

#####

#####

**THE END**


End file.
